Coming Undone
by Kouri Arashi
Summary: Stiles deals with the aftermath of being abducted by Peter Hale and left for dead. It's harder than he would have thought to accept his place in the pack when he's convinced that he's the 'weak one' and can't protect himself. Fortunately, Scott and Sheriff Stilinski are there to help, and to nag Derek until he helps, too.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: In the season 1 finale, when Peter opened the trunk of his car, before I saw the nurse inside I thought, "OMG, he's going to put Stiles in the trunk and leave him for dead somewhere!" He didn't... so I did!_

_My first attempt at Teen Wolf fanfiction... I hope it's okay! Fic is all Stiles-POV, since Stiles is awesome. Plot will most likely creep in later, but at least at the beginning, it's all Stiles abuse and hurt/comfort, two of my favorite things._

Chapter One

"I don't want to be like you."

The look that crosses over Peter's face at Stiles' flat statement starts as surprise, moves onto a brief flash of disappointment, and then hardens into something like rage. It's there and gone before Stiles can really process it, returning back to his typical blank look. There's something unsettling about that look on Peter's face, when his emotions run so deep and out-of-control. He turns back to the trunk of the car and opens it again.

"That's a shame," he said, his tone neutral. Stiles wants to run, but his legs won't let him. The logical side of his brain reminds him that fast moves excite the predator, and running would only guarantee his messy demise. "I think that you would have made an interesting addition to my pack, Stiles." He takes the nurse by the wrist and pulls her out of the trunk, letting her body drop heavy and lifeless to the floor of the garage. Peter studies her for a moment, then gives an 'oh well' sort of shrug and gestures at the newly vacated trunk of the car. "Get in."

"What?" Stiles asks, more out of a lack of desire to comply than a lack of understanding.

Peter just gestures again. "Get in the trunk."

Stiles hesitates, but only for a moment. There isn't a lot he can do besides obey. So he folds himself into the trunk of the car. It smells, smells like death and decay and the smallest hint of the nurse's flowery perfume. Stiles feels his stomach turn but clenches his teeth down over the sensation. Peter closes the trunk door over him, and he's in darkness.

Breathing shallowly through his mouth, Stiles reminds himself to be calm. He knows where Peter is heading, after all, out to the Hale house. Stiles still isn't quite sure what sort of game Derek is playing or whose side he's on, and at the moment he doesn't care. He just wants to get the hell away from Peter.

The car starts and then begins to move. It's disorienting, in the darkness, not being able to compensate for the shifts and turns, but the Hale house isn't that far. He'll make it. The road is smooth for a while, maybe ten minutes, and then becomes bouncy. A dirt road, and the little four-door isn't really suited for it the way his Jeep would be. Stiles sometimes wonders how Derek gets all the way to the Hale house without tearing the undercarriage out of the fancy sports car he drives.

The bouncing and the turning, combined with the foul odor in the trunk, make him feel even more sick. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to keep his dinner where it belongs. He's suddenly glad he didn't eat very much anyway. Too nervous about his date with Lydia – among other things.

After what seems like an interminable length of time, the car jolts to a stop, and then the engine goes silent. Stiles waits until he hears the door open and shut, and then bangs his fist on the lid of the trunk. "C'mon, let me out!" he shouts.

The only thing he hears in reply is a soft laugh. And then nothing. Not even footsteps.

The silence is creepy, but he's okay, he takes a few more deep breaths and then remembers that that's a mistake. He gags, but keeps everything down. With no way of knowing where they are, he has to assume they're somewhere near the Hale house, and that Peter has gone off to collect Derek and finish his revenge. Scott must be around somewhere; all he has to do is wait.

Minutes trickle by, and he starts to shiver. While the car was running, some heat was seeping back into the trunk, but now it's getting colder by the minute. He had been able to see his breath out on the lacrosse field, and he wasn't exactly dressed for the weather. He wonders what time it is. He wonders all sorts of things, to be honest, his brain jumping from one topic to the next the way it always does whenever he hasn't had his Adderall. His focus can be incredible, when it chooses to kick in, but right now his mind is just wandering.

There's a sudden 'pop' noise, and he startles, almost hitting his head against the roof of the trunk. It's the sound of a gunshot, he thinks, not at all close but still unmistakable.

Several minutes, each one longer than the last, drag by.

There's another gun shot. Then another. And then three in quick succession.

Then silence.

Figuring that now is as good a time as any, and at least _someone_ is nearby, somewhere, Stiles starts banging on the roof of the trunk again and shouting for help. He stops every minute or so, being methodical, straining his ears for the sound of anyone approaching. But there's nothing. He shouts until he's hoarse and his voice gives out altogether, pounds on the roof and sides of the trunk with both fists until his hands ache.

He's thirsty, now, in addition to being cold. He thinks about whether it would be better to freeze to death or to die of thirst. How cold is it going to get? Thirties? Or even lower? At what temperature do people start to freeze to death? He adds this to his never-ending, always-growing list of 'things he should look up', for whenever he gets out of this.

Or what about suffocation? The trunk seems pretty solid, but he supposes that he's getting air flow from the rest of the car. He doubts it's airtight; to construct it that way would just be too much trouble. He thinks about looking that up someday, too, although he supposes it could be awkward to Google 'would someone suffocate in the trunk of a car'. Then again, he supposes he's Googled worse things.

Now that he's thinking about, he thinks he read somewhere that in a lot of these newer cars, the trunks have some sort of safety latch in case somebody gets stuck inside. He feels around for anything, takes care to be methodical, tugs and pushes on every lump and knob he can find. But there's nothing. If there's any sort of mechanism, he's not finding it. So he does it again. And again. The repetition keeps him calm.

It's been far too long. Peter still hasn't come back.

His feet and hands are the coldest. He can tuck his hands into his armpits, but there isn't much he can do about his feet. He silently curses the flimsy dress shoes and thin socks he was wearing with them. He should have just worn his sneakers. Then again, this is not how he anticipated his evening going. Maybe he should have. That's just how his life has been going lately.

He wonders if maybe Peter wasn't planning to come back, but figured he would just leave him in the trunk to rot. But that doesn't make sense, not really. If Peter had wanted him dead, he would have just killed him. No, he had some sort of plan, either to make Stiles suffer for insulting him, or some use for him that Stiles didn't know about. Either way, odds were very good that Peter had planned to come back for the car. But he still isn't back, and Stiles isn't sure what that means. He thinks back to the gunshots, and wonders if Peter is dead. He wonders if all of them are dead. He's fairly sure that Allison's father wouldn't have shot Scott, but not positive, and who knew about Derek?

Either way, he'd be missed before long. When the dance was over, his father would be looking for him, regardless of what the werewolves were doing. He might not worry until the next morning, teenaged boys being the way they were, but when he woke up and Stiles was still nowhere to be found, he would go looking for him. It was only a matter of time. All he had to do was wait.

All of this goes through his mind while he continues to feel around for any sort of release mechanism. He still can't find one, and slams his fist into the floor in frustration.

He wonders what time it is, how long it's been. He curses himself for leaving his phone in his jacket pocket, and his jacket draped over a chair at the dance. He curses his father for insisting he wear a _nice_ watch with his suit, not his usual digital watch with the light up face. He can hear the watch going tick-tick-tick, but can't see it in the utter darkness. He tries counting the seconds, but his focus is nowhere near good enough for that at the moment.

Things start to take on strange shapes, and every tiny forest noise makes him twitch and jump. He's not used to things being so black and so silent. Even in his room at night, he'll leave a fan running so he's got that hum of white noise in the background, and it's hardly ever really _dark_. The cold is numbing him; he's huddled up as small as possible and hopes that will be enough.

Some time later, he realizes with a jolt that he's dozed off. That obviously won't do. He needs to stay awake, in case somebody comes by, so he can make some noise and someone can get him out. His legs have gone almost completely numb, both from the cold and the fact that he can't move. He shifts as much as he can, trying to shake feeling back into them. It doesn't do much good.

He yawns despite himself and falls back to sleep.

It's hunger that wakes him, hunger and thirst and an unfortunate need to empty his bladder. The latter is just embarrassing, but the three together give him the feeling that hours have passed. It might even be morning. And still Peter has not returned. At this point it seems fairly obvious that Peter is not going to return. Either he's dead, or has had to abandon his old plan for some new one and has tossed Stiles aside just like his nurse. No matter what's happened, Stiles knows he's on his own.

But he also knows that the body of the nurse will probably be found soon, if it hasn't been found already. Part of a murder investigation is tracking the victim's last steps, so presuming that they don't just write her off as another animal attack, they'll be looking for her car. That's good, since he's in her car. Of course, he still has no idea where the car is. If it's parked on the side of some dirt forest road, as he suspects, it could be days or even weeks before anyone finds it.

Licking his cracked lips, he knows that he doesn't have days or weeks.

It must be morning, he realizes. It's not as cold. The sun must be beating down on the trunk of the car, warming the interior. It's still freezing, but not quite _as_ freezing. He makes a mental note about researching hypothermia and frostbite the next time he's at a computer. Then he stares up at the darkness of the trunk, waiting for something to happen. The waiting is driving him mad. His mind, always ready to occupy itself with random junk, is spinning like tires stuck in mud. Nowhere to go, no traction to gain.

_Do you want the bite? _

It's Peter's voice, loud and clear like he's standing right there, and Stiles startles and lets out a shout.

Was he dreaming again? He didn't think he had been asleep. Hallucinating? Did hypothermia cause hallucinations? Did dehydration?

The panic is seizing him now, and he can't break its momentum, can't shake it, can't stop it. He starts pounding on the roof of the trunk again, until his fists ache. Every time he takes a breath it only reminds him of the dead nurse, the way Peter casually tossed her body onto the floor, of the fact that he's going to be just as dead as she is if nobody finds him soon.

He screams and screams until his throat aches and he can taste blood in his mouth, and then he keeps screaming until exhaustion overtakes him.

He can't move, his leg is seizing and twitching now, cramped with the worst Charley Horse he's ever had. He tries to reach down and massage it out, but he can't really reach his calf very well, and in doing so only manages to pull a muscle in his shoulder, so now that hurts too. He would have cried if there was still enough moisture in his body, and with a flush of embarrassment despite the fact that he's alone, he realizes that he pissed his pants while he'd been panicking.

There are no atheists in foxholes, he's heard, so he tries praying for a bit, and drifts in and out of consciousness, and the blackness gets blacker and the quiet gets quieter with every moment that trickles by. He can picture it now, like grains of sand slipping between his fingers, and he's starting to realize that he's going to die, that Peter has left him somewhere that no one will find, that someday in the far future two kids goofing off in the forest like him and Scott will find this old broken down car with a skeleton in the trunk.

The cold sets in again, so he decides that it must be night. He shakes and shudders and tries gnawing on his own fingers to produce some moisture or maybe just keep them warm, but there's nothing, and somewhere in there he loses track of everything. He floats away into a mass of conflicting thoughts and emotions, blurred dreams where Derek is berating him for his carelessness and Scott is breaking free of the radiator to try to tear him apart, dreams where he's back in the hospital hearing the soft squeak of the nurse's shoes, the murmurs of the doctors as they give his father still more bad news and nobody wants to look at him.

Then there's a thump.

He startles awake again, although without much motion. He blinks at nothing and drifts away. Then, loud and startling, there's a voice. "Yeah, this is the car all right. I'll call it in."

Stiles goes into a complete frenzy of banging on the door and shouting and kicking at the sides of the trunk. Or at least, that's what he means to do, but he's alarmed to find that his body just isn't cooperating anymore. His legs twitch feebly; his arms won't move. He manages a weak slap on the floor of the trunk and a faint moan, probably not audible more than a foot from his mouth. His throat burns and his mouth is almost sticky with the lack of moisture, counter-intuitive but true.

The man outside is talking on his radio, something about calling a tow truck, and now Stiles knows he's really in trouble. If he can't get the men to realize he's there, he will almost certainly be dead before anyone finds him. He grits his teeth and summons his strength. His legs are hopeless, crammed into such a small space, so he concentrates on banging his fist against the floor of the trunk. It doesn't move as much as he hopes, but as his muscles warm up a little, drawing on reserves of desperation, he manages to make a few decent sized thumps. The shouts are more like grunts, but he makes them anyway, forcing those pathetic noises past his teeth and into the fetid air of the trunk.

"Did you hear that?" one of the men says, as Stiles is pausing to pant for breath, wondering why he's gasping after such little movement.

"Hnh?" the other one responds, clearly not paying attention.

Stiles slams his fist down with the last of his strength and croaks, "Let! Me! Out of here!"

"I – I think I heard something from the trunk," the guy says, and little lights and flashes of the Hallelujah chorus go off in Stiles' brain. There's movement outside, and more talking that he doesn't really hear, and then a crunching noise, a screech of metal on metal, and the trunk pops open.

Cold air blows in and the bright sunlight stabs at Stiles' eyes to the point where he would have screamed if he had had the breath. He pushes himself up and nearly falls over the lip of the trunk, taking in deep breaths of the fresh air and celebrating the fact that hey, he's alive, so things are definitely looking up despite the fact that he just nearly fell face first into a pile of leaves.

"Whoa," one of the officers says, and grabs him before he can fall.

"Holy shit," the other said, "that's Stilinski's kid."

Things happen very fast then, with lots of jabbering on radios, and Stiles doesn't care about any of it because he's out of the damned trunk. The light hurts his eyes and he still can't feel much of his body, but none of that really matters. One of them takes off his coat and wraps it around his shoulders before lifting him out of the trunk and setting him down on the side of the road. Stiles presses his face into the ground and tries not to pass out. They offer him a little water, and he sips it carefully but then retches into the dirt and leaves.

"Shit, that's bad, right?" one of them murmurs, and Stiles doesn't think he would normally be able to hear him except his senses seems somewhat heightened by the prolonged deprivation. "When they can't even keep water down?"

The ambulance jolts up the dirt road then and people are leaning over him and surrounding him and trying to wrap him in blankets, and Stiles can't take it, he freaks out. They're all too _close_ to him, and he can feel the sides of the trunk pressing in around him, it's almost as bad as being inside. One of them takes out a needle and his freak-out grows to epic proportions, and he finds strength that he doesn't know was left inside him as he squirms and struggles and tries to get away from them. A familiar voice is thundering something, he can't make out words, someone's trying to pin him down but he's not going to let them, he's not going back in that damned trunk, he doesn't care what he has to do.

"Stiles," the voice says, and then louder and sharper, "_Stiles_," and then a moment later, something he didn't expect: his real name, his given name. He hasn't heard it in years, probably, and it breaks him out of the panic and he blinks up at his father somewhat stupidly.

"Dad," he whispers, scraping up shreds of comprehension, reassembling the world into some sort of order.

"God, Stiles, you – " And Stilinski's voice breaks in a way that Stiles hasn't heard it do in a very long time, and he's more than happy to let himself be gathered up into his father's embrace, relaxing limp into the circle of his arms. After a moment, Stilinski clears his throat and says, "They need to get an IV in you, Stiles, because you're dehydrated. Stop fighting them, okay?"

Stiles gives a little nod, which makes his head pound and throb, and the world do this funny loopy wavy thing. He flinches when he sees the needle again, and presses his face into his father's shoulder so he won't have to watch, and somewhere in between the feel of his father's jacket against his cheek and the pinch of the needle, he passes out.

* * *

Some time later, hours or days, he drifts back into the world to find someone rubbing his legs with burning hot towels. He lets out a little grunting noise and then squints until things come into focus again. He's surprised, but not surprised, to see that Melissa McCall is the one abusing him. "S'too hot," he murmurs.

"I know it feels that way, honey," Melissa says, "but they're actually only a little warm. You have frostbite on your arms and legs. We're just trying to warm you back up."

"Hurts," Stiles rasps, and that was stupid, why did he say that? He thinks he might actually cry, and that is so many worlds of unacceptable. He tries to focus himself on other things, tries to remember all the things he wanted to know while he was trapped – but he shudders when he thinks of that, and pushes those thoughts away. "Is Lydia okay?" he slurs out. His tongue feels swollen, his mouth is still dry.

"Yes, she's here, she seems to be recovering fine," Melissa says.

"What 'bout Scott?"

Melissa gives him a somewhat keen look at this, as if considering interrogating Stiles while he's in his weakened state, but then apparently decides against it. "Scott's okay too."

Stiles tries to gather himself, tries to focus. The repetitive motion of the towel against the skin of his legs is starting to feel kind of good, and he's way too far gone to feel embarrassment. He blinks, several times, slowly. "Thirsty," he finally says.

Melissa glances at her watch, then checks the state of his IV. "I'll give you a cup of water, but just a cup, and you have to promise to drink it slowly. Okay?"

"Okay," Stiles says. Melissa brings him over a tiny plastic cup, but he can't sit up to drink it, and she has to prop him up and hold the cup to his mouth while he takes little sips. "Nnnhgh," Stiles tells her, as dizziness rocks him and his stomach roils.

"I know, you feel pretty crappy," Melissa said, putting the cup aside still half-full and helping him lay down again. "You were really dehydrated," she added. "No quicker way to make someone feel terrible."

"How long was I – " in the trunk, the words are, but he can't say them, can't even think them.

Melissa gives him a sideways glance and he realizes that nobody can really answer that question because nobody knows when he was put _in_ the trunk. But she answers readily enough, "The last time anyone saw you was when you left the dance looking for Lydia. That was Friday night, around eight o'clock. It was about four PM on Sunday when they found you. You've been at the hospital about three hours."

Two days, almost two full days, Stiles grasp of math supplies. Humans can go without water for three days and then they're dead. So did that make him sixty-six percent dead when they found him? God only knew that he had felt a lot deader than that.

"Of course, we're missing a lot of the story here," Melissa says, still gently massaging the knots in his legs out with the towel, which no longer felt hot. "Lots of people have questions for you, especially your dad, but that can wait until you're feeling a bit better."

Stiles thinks he might throw up again, as his leg spasms a little, but manages to keep the water down. "Where's my dad?"

Melissa lets out a little sigh. "He's out working. A lot happened, some dead bodies were found, and . . . he wanted to stay, Stiles. He did. But his job is important to him, too, and I promised him that I would take care of you and not leave your side for an instant."

Stiles wonders some other things too, like where Scott is, and why Melissa's face had tightened like that when Stiles had asked about him, but everything is still too blurry and washed out for him to really care. He musters up some energy and mumbles, "Who were the bodies?"

Melissa frowns at him, clearly wondering why that mattered, but answers again nonetheless. "One of them was a nurse who worked at the hospital. Well – that's how they found you. You were in the trunk of her car. The other was Kate Argent. Allison's aunt."

So Peter had gotten that far, at least. But if Peter's body hadn't been found, that meant he hadn't been killed, or at least that whatever had been killed hadn't been recognizable as human afterwards. Stiles takes a deep breath and tries not to show how shaken he is at this news. There's no reason that Peter would come after him again. He had been a means to an end, nothing more or less. The panic creeps up on him regardless, invading every cell and overtaking every thought.

"Oh, honey," Melissa says, and Stiles realizes that he's shaking and whimpering like a beaten puppy. That was embarrassing. "You're okay, honey, I promise, you're safe here, you're okay . . ."

It takes a while for the soothing mantra to sink in, but gradually, his body relaxes again. He takes a hiccupy breath and Melissa lets him have another sip or two of the water. Finally, he says, "You should, uh . . . you should call my dad. Because . . . I can at least tell him what happened to the nurse. I don't know about Kate, but . . ."

Melissa rubs his shoulders and said, "Okay, Stiles, I'll give him a call."

Stiles nods, but as soon as Melissa leaves the room, he tenses up again, every nerve and muscle in his body starting to tie back up into that terrible knot. He wants her to come back, he wants his dad, he wants Scott, he wants _anybody_. He wants his mom.

She's gone for less than two minutes, but by the time she comes back, half of her work has been undone. Still, she doesn't chide Stiles for the way that he's now curled up on his side, hugging his arms to his chest like he's trying to hold all the emotions inside. She just straightens him out and goes back to work on his legs, and starts telling him about the science of it, the way they slowly reintroduce circulation into the skin cells and how rewarming therapy works. Scott's mom knows him pretty well, and Stiles is able to focus on the information she's imparting, fitting it into his own knowledge of science.

Either Sheriff Stilinski isn't far away or he drives like a bat out of hell, because he comes jogging down the hall and into Stiles' room less than fifteen minutes later. Stiles looks up when he comes in and sees the worry in his father's eyes. He knows that the loss of his mother was devastating to both of them, and he doesn't need to see the dark circles underneath his father's eyes or the coffee stains on his shirt to know that the past two days must have been hell for him. So he puts a smile on his face and says, "Hi, Dad," like everything's normal and he's perfectly okay.

Relief, immense, almost painful relief, washes over Stilinski's face, so Stiles figures he did the right thing. He sits down in the chair next to him, and Melissa draws the blankets down over Stiles' legs and just works on his feet. "How are you feeling, son?"

"Considering the circumstances, like a million bucks," Stiles says.

Stilinski gives him a little frown and then turns a questioning glance on Melissa. She smiles at him. "He'll be okay. He's got some frostbite, but it's only first degree, nothing too severe. His hands are pretty bruised," she adds, and for the first time Stiles actually looks at his hands and realizes that they're bandaged, "and actually a couple broken fingers, but nothing that won't heal with time. We're getting fluids reintroduced into his system. Two days is a long time to go without water, so we have to be careful and do it slowly."

All of this is met with a little nod. Then Stilinski turns to his son and says, almost awkwardly, "What can you tell me?"

Stiles has to resist the urge to say, "Well, to start with, werewolves." There might be a time and a place for that discussion, but he isn't having it now. "Peter Hale," he says. "He hurt Lydia, and abducted me, and killed his nurse. I think he probably killed Kate Argent, too, because she's the one who started the Hale house fire. At least I think she was."

Stilinski makes a little frown, but gestures for Stiles to go on. Stiles takes a deep breath and says, "I . . . I can't tell you how I know most of this. Okay?"

His father narrows his eyes, but then nods and says, "Okay. At least for now."

So Stiles tells him the pieces he had put together, some of which he had done in the trunk of the car without realizing it, while his brain ran in circles. His father 'mm hms' occasionally, but mostly stays silent. He twitches a little when Stiles gets to finding Lydia injured on the field, and then Peter abducting him and using him to find Derek so they could go find Kate. He leaves out werewolves, though, which makes it sound like Peter had physically overpowered him, and Stilinski finds this a little confusing, since the man had been a cripple in the hospital up until the week before.

"That's quite a story, son," he finally says.

Stiles stares at him and realizes, somewhat belatedly, how crazy it all sounds. Much like the delusional ramblings of someone who was dehydrated and frostbitten and had spent the last two days locked in the trunk of the car. He lets his head fall backwards, suddenly exhausted. "Yeah, Dad," he mumbles. "Quite a story."

"But," Stilinski says slowly, "Peter Hale has been missing since around the same time that his nurse disappeared, and Chris Argent also said that he suspects his sister was responsible for the Hale house fire. So as crazy as it sounds, it might tie the pieces together."

That's unexpected – corroboration from Chris Argent. Stiles opens his eyes again. "What – what about Derek Hale?" he asks, not totally sure that he wants to know.

"Nobody's seen him either," Stilinski says. After a moment, he says, "You get some rest now. I've got work to do."

"But – " Stiles says, and then cuts the word off by snapping his mouth shut over it.

Stilinski hesitates. "Do you, uh, do you want me to stay?"

"No, it's cool, I'm totally cool," Stiles says. "You have work to do. Got it. I'm just gonna sleep anyway, so it'd be pretty boring for you to stay."

"Well, if you wanted me to, I could – "

"No, really, Dad," Stiles says. "I'm okay." He fakes a huge yawn. "Mrs. McCall doesn't need to baby-sit me, either, she's got work to do with other patients. I'm just gonna get some sleep. You go . . . bring justice to the world or something."

"If you're sure," Stilinski says, and ducks out of the room when Stiles confirms that really, he was sure, the embarrassment is killing him.

Melissa gives Stiles a smile and said, "I've still got some work to do on your feet, anyway. So I'll be in here a little while longer. It's getting late, though, so you should get some rest. Tell you what, I'll let Scott out of school tomorrow so he can come keep you company."

Company sounds good. Werewolf company who could at least partially protect him from Peter Hale sounds great. Stiles nods and obediently closes his eyes. For a moment there's nothing but the general hum of hospital noise. His eyes snap back open. "Can you turn on a radio or something?" he asks. Melissa nods and brings in the little radio from her desk. He falls asleep to the sound of her singing along with the Beach Boys. She can't carry a tune in a bucket and doesn't know half the words. It's starkly real and strangely comforting.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

He expects his sleep to be restless, but it's not. The combination of drugs and dehydration and exhaustion drag him down into deep unconsciousness that he's immensely grateful for. He doesn't wake even with that stupid blood pressure machine squeezing his arm every ten minutes. In fact, he doesn't wake until an orderly bumps his bed, and then he wakes up gasping. It takes ten minutes for them to calm him down, which they are fortunately able to do without pharmaceutical intervention. He asks for Melissa, but is told that she's gone home. The clock next to his bed tells him that it's early, six fifteen, and it's insane how glad he is just to know what time it is. He even watches the clock for a while, watches the minutes tick by, remembering how time passes after the strange timelessness in the trunk.

At seven, the doctor comes in and checks all his frostbite patches, and looks at his hands. Stiles isn't sure how his fingers got broken, and the doctor says it's from trauma, so he presumes that he broke them himself in his efforts to get out of the trunk. There's a bruise on his cheek, too, from where Peter slammed his face into the car. Stiles remembers the werewolf's iron grip on the back of his neck and feels queasy.

He's recovering well, according to the doctor, getting rehydrated without any complications. His stomach growls, and the doctor smiles and makes a comment about the resilience of the human body. Stiles asks if that resilience will be rewarded with a whopper and fries. Maybe later, the doctor says.

Instead, they bring him a tray with a small portion of plain scrambled eggs, half a piece of toast without butter, and part of a banana, cut into slices. He wrinkles his nose at it, but eats anyway. Ten minutes later, he's retching into a basin that the orderly brings him. "A little too soon, hon," she says, with a sympathetic smile. Stiles leans back into the pillow and is glad that nobody's here to see this. "We'll try again at lunchtime," she adds, and they add an anti-nausea medication to whatever he's already getting. He looks at the IV, watches it drip-drip-drip, and wonders what's in it. He finds that he doesn't really care.

Scott shows up at about half past nine, and he looks like shit: pale and tired, bags under his eyes, messed up hair. Stiles wastes no time in telling him exactly how much shit he looks like. He slumps into the chair next to the bed and says, "That's rich, coming from the guy in the hospital bed. Dude, have you looked at yourself in a mirror?"

"Nope," Stiles said, and thinks that if Scott pulls out a mirror, he'll punch his friend in the face. He has absolutely zero interest in knowing how bad he looks. "What happened to you?"

Scott takes a stealthy look around, then lifts his shirt so Stiles can see the bandages on his abdomen. He lifts those up, too, to reveal a nasty, puckering wound.

"Dude," Stiles says, "didn't you _just_ get shot there, like, two days ago?"

"Other side," Scott replies.

This is good, this is something to focus on. "It's not healing."

"Wolfsbane," Scott says. He fixes the bandages and pulls his shirt down, and then tells the story from the beginning. Being cornered by Chris Argent and his stupid SUV in the parking lot, freaking out when Allison saw his face, taking off. Finding Derek in the Hale house and telling him about how Peter killed his sister to become the alpha of the pack. Allison showing up with her batshit crazy aunt, and then Chris keeping her from shooting him. Peter showing up, ripping Kate's throat out, attacking Allison. "Everything went to shit after that," Scott says. "Derek and I were fighting him, but we were really getting our asses handed to us, if we're gonna be honest. Then Allison's dad got up and started shooting. He put three bullets in Peter and one in me. It was an accident."

"An accident," Stiles says, somewhat skeptically.

"Well, I think it was," Scott says. "I mean, if he wanted me shot, all he had to do was stay quiet while Kate did it. Peter and I were fighting, sorta tangled up together, you know? So I think he was aiming for Peter but I just got in the way."

"What happened after that?"

"Peter ran off into the forest. I missed what happened for a bit because I was, you know, writhing around on the ground."

Stiles wonders how Scott can admit that so easily.

"Apparently Allison screamed at her dad for shooting me until he agreed to give Derek one of the wolfsbane bullets so they could fix me up. They took me to the animal clinic, where my boss – don't even get me started, I've got no freakin' clue what's going on there – helped them. But I was still pretty sick afterwards."

"What about Derek?" Stiles asks.

"I dunno. He was gone from the clinic by the time I woke up. I think he went back to the house to try to find Peter, but I haven't heard anything about it." Scott swallows and studies the ground. "Dude, Stiles, they – they didn't even tell me you were missing. Dr. Deaton and, and Derek and Allison, they all hid it from me. They thought if I knew – "

"You would do something stupid like crawl out of your hospital bed, leaking blood and aconite poisoning, and start trying to find me," Stiles finishes for him.

"Yeah," Scott says, rubbing one hand over the back of his head. "I never should have left you guys at the dance, knowing Peter was still out there, and you and Lydia . . ."

Stiles is too tired to deal with Scott's guilt issues, when he has some serious guilt issues of his own to work through. But he deals with it anyway, because Scott is his friend, and as usual, he's being an idiot. "Shut the hell up, Scott," he says. "You can't be everywhere at once, you know. Even if you'd still been at the dance, it probably would've gone down the same way. We were out on the lacrosse field because Lydia wandered off to look for Jackson. It's not like he came and grabbed me right from the gym."

Some of the guilt clears off of Scott's face, and he looks a little better. "Yeah, I guess you're right," he says. "Anyway, my mom told me last night that you were here, and then she had to tell me where they had found you. Your turn."

So Stiles tells him about Lydia getting upset because Jackson was being his usual douchey self, and how he had found her on the lacrosse field. He tells him about agreeing to help Peter so Peter wouldn't kill Lydia, and then them using Scott's phone to find Derek. He glosses over detail, a lot, which makes it a very short story. He doesn't mention knowing Scott's username and password, or giving it to Peter, and just sort of hopes that Scott doesn't know enough about phones and GPS to figure out that Stiles had sold him out.

"I guess he intended to come back for the car, and therefore me," Stiles finishes, "but instead got shot a bunch of times by Mr. Argent. So Dad had them looking for the nurse's car, and that's how they found me."

Scott fidgets, clearly uncomfortable. Stiles has said next to nothing about the actual time spent in the trunk, summing it up with 'it was dark, and I was really thirsty'. Scott is looking at his hands, at the bandages that hide the injuries from the part where Stiles totally lost his shit and tried to claw his way out. He doesn't even remember doing it.

Eventually, Scott comes to the conclusion that he doesn't want to talk about what happened to Stiles any more than Stiles does, so he starts talking about his favorite subject: Allison. Who can shoot a bow and is apparently amazing. Who still loves him even though he's a werewolf. Who wasn't afraid to tell her father to go to hell and fix the fact that he had just shot her boyfriend with wolfsbane, specifically the boyfriend who had just saved her from the werewolf who was _actually_ a danger.

Stiles listens because it's comforting to hear that Scott is still Scott. It means there's room in the universe for Stiles to still be Stiles.

* * *

He understands now why Melissa had been giving him the side-eye; when she comes in for her shift at eleven AM, she fusses a great deal over Scott in general and not knowing what was wrong with him specifically. He fends her off with his usual good humor. Stiles naps for a bit and then gets to attempt food again at half past twelve. By then his dad is there, as well as Scott, so it's a little embarrassing when his body rejects the plain turkey sandwich and banana. Bananas again. High in potassium. He thinks that dehydration causes low potassium, which would explain why they keep trying to feed him bananas, which are not his favorite fruit.

The doctor makes some soothing noises about how this isn't unusual, while Stilinski grills him on Stiles' condition. This is rather amusing, to be honest, because Stilinski knows very little about medicine so he only has half an idea what the doctor is talking about.

In the end, Stiles gets annoyed because he finds out that they had been planning to discharge him that evening if he could keep food down, so the fact that he was puking means he's going to spend another night in the hospital. Melissa pats him on the shoulder and reminds him that he was seriously dehydrated, and also, to shut the hell up.

Scott somehow got his phone back during all of this, and Stilinski brought Stiles' over, so they spend the afternoon playing Angry Birds and screwing around. Scott leaves at about two thirty, because he wants to attend lacrosse practice even though he's not up to participating, "just in case Coach has any new plays to go over." Stiles rolls his eyes and thinks about reminding Scott that Coach hasn't suggested an actual play in about twenty years, but lets it go. He suspects that Scott really just wants to see Allison, nd doesn't totally blame him, and to be fair, sitting in the hospital is boring. He's immensely glad for his phone.

Scott is gone and his father is still working, so Stiles naps for a while, and reads the news on his cell phone for a while, and gets embarrassed when he needs help to go to the bathroom. He has pasta and a little plain chicken for dinner, and makes dire threats to his digestive tract if it doesn't start behaving properly. It does. He's still a little nauseous, but the food stays down, and they give him some juice as a reward. All in all, he's definitely feeling better, and tries to nag the doctor into releasing him early, which has no effect. "Maybe in the morning," he says, and goes about his business. Stiles sulks, because nobody's there to see it.

But ultimately he's still sick and exhausted, and sleeps through his father's evening visit, though he knows he was there because when he wakes up around two AM, he can smell his father's aftershave. It's a fresh smell, too strong, which means his father used too much, which means he had gone several days without shaving. Stiles supposes that this isn't a surprise.

At first, he's not sure why he woke up – beyond the fact that his sleep schedule and sense of time is all shot to hell – until he sees the figure in the black leather jacket lurking in the corner of his room.

His freakout is immediate and automatic, but aborted somewhat when his flailing body is pinned to the bed by two hundred plus pounds of dark and broody. "Calm down," Derek said, and surprisingly, Stiles does. He blinks up at Derek, a little stupidly, but feels better in his presence because Derek can protect him – Derek _has_ protected him, Derek _will_ protect him.

"Sorry," he says, and Derek shrugs. "What are you doing here?"

Derek gives him one of those sharp, penetrating looks. "I need you to tell me everything Peter said."

Stiles swallows thickly. "You can't find him."

"I _haven't_ found him," Derek corrects. "But I will."

"Scott said he was shot by three wolfsbane bullets," Stiles says. "I mean, he can't have gone far, right? He should be dead and you're just looking for a body, right?"

Derek, who clearly doesn't feel sorry for Stiles at all, says, "I survived being shot with wolfsbane, and so did Scott. Now shut up and tell me what happened. Tell me everything he said to you, everything you saw, everything you remember."

Stiles really doesn't want to do this, because it means not glossing over all the details, and he really doesn't want Derek knowing about all the details. But he does, because he really, _really_ doesn't want to have to worry about Peter wandering around. He tells him about the way Peter attacked Lydia, the fact that he prefers Macs and has his own my-fi, that he squashed Stiles' keys in one hand. He tells Derek that Peter offered him the bite. He hadn't told Scott that, just making it seem like Peter had stuffed him in the trunk so he wouldn't run off and start making Molotov cocktails or anything crazy like that.

Derek doesn't seem particularly surprised by any of this, looking off into the distance with that faint glower that's omnipresent on his face. When Stiles eventually trails off into silence, he stands up as if to go.

"Was any of that helpful?" Stiles asks, and Derek just shrugs a little, so Stiles doesn't say anything else. Then Derek turns that look on him again. "What?"

Derek glares at him for a minute, as if put off by his compliance and the lack of his usual smart mouth and sarcasm. Then he shakes his head, says, "Nothing," and leaves without another word. Stiles is awake the rest of the night, watching the minutes slide by on the clock.

He's desperately relieved when his breakfast stays down, and starts nagging every nurse and every orderly who comes near his room to discharge him. They keep telling him that the doctor will decide when he gets to go, and he won't get to go a minute sooner than that. Around noon, his father comes back in for a little while, and he and the doctor have a serious conference. The doctor has decided he's okay to go home, and Stilinski drives Stiles moderately insane by asking "are you sure?" about eight hundred times. After repeated, "Dad, I'm fine" and several, "As long as he takes it easy, he'll be okay," Stilinski agrees that it's time to go.

Paperwork is done. Stilinski runs home to grab a T-shirt and pair of pants for Stiles to get wear, since his clothes from the car are pretty funky and he never wants to see them again. Melissa helps him get dressed and gives him a hug before he's deposited in a wheelchair and rolled out of the hospital. It's chilly out, but Stiles has his jacket now, and his father puts a winter hat on him despite his protests that it's at least fifty degrees.

"Now, the doctor says you have to stay in bed for a couple more days," he says, as if Stiles wasn't there while they had this discussion.

"Dad, I'm fine," Stiles says.

"So you need to take it easy, okay?"

"Dad, I'm _fine_," Stiles repeats.

"I called the school, they're going to put together a packet of make-up work for you, and I'll run and pick it up later this afternoon. You can go back to school next week."

Stiles doesn't bother to repeat himself again, since it's obvious that his father isn't listening, and to be fair, it's a pretty blatant lie. So he lets his dad support most of his weight on the way into the house, lets his dad get him settled on the sofa and start looking through their movie collection. Stiles is a teenaged boy, so his favorite movies are horror and action and things with loud explosions and guns and, well, sometimes werewolves. He winces away from everything his father considers putting on, until he finds a rather dusty DVD of 'An American Tail'.

"Yeah, that," Stiles says.

Stilinski looks at the DVD. He looks at his son, wan and pale and wrapped up in blankets, and says, "Okay." Then he puts the DVD in.

He makes popcorn and they spend the afternoon and evening watching that, and The Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver and Company. Stiles remembers the days after his mother died, when these movies were all he watched, and he even manages to eat some popcorn without feeling sick. By the time night falls, he's feeling like he's got a handle on everything, that he really is fine. He wants a shower, because he still feels disgusting, but his father makes him take a bath instead, since he's still wobbly on his feet. That's okay. He soaks in the tub for a while, gets himself dried off without help, and takes his laptop into bed with him. He's yawning as he realizes that he doesn't _really_ want to know about hypothermia and whether or not you can suffocate in a car trunk, so he reads Star Wars fanfiction until it's clearly past time that he should be sleeping.

He puts the laptop aside and turns out the bedside lamp, and then stares up at the ceiling the dark. It's not _truly_ dark, not stuffed-in-the-trunk-of-a-car-and-left-in-the-forest dark, but it's much too dark for his taste. Every creak of the house settling or hoot of an owl outside has him wanting to jump out of his skin. He resists the urge to turn the lamp back on for over an hour, until it becomes clear that he's only working himself up and sleep will be a long time coming. No one's there to hassle him about being afraid of the dark, so he turns the lamp back on and eventually drifts off to sleep.

_Do you want the bite? _

In the dream, he watches in paralyzed fascination as Peter's mouth descends towards his wrist. He watches him _change_. Sees the teeth and claws, sees the monster underneath the man. In real life, seeing that face had made him think of chaining Scott to his radiator, made him yank his wrist away. In the dream he can't move, can't even breathe as Peter's teeth tear into his flesh. He feels the change overtake him, feels himself turning, feels himself struggling with Peter as Peter tries to force him into the trunk. He wakes himself screaming, the blankets twisted around him and his shirt soaked with sweat. He gasps for air, his chest tight and aching, the world spinning around him and red eyes lurking in every corner.

His father has him by the shoulders, and is shaking him, and Stiles try to fight him but his father is stronger even on his worst day. Eventually he collapses forward into his father's arms, his entire body trembling and shuddering. Stilinski rubs his back and rocks him back and forth like he's four years old again, and Stiles can't even be embarrassed about it, he's so God damned scared.

A few choked out sobs escape him, but he shuts that down pretty quickly, and finally manages to stop shaking. His father leaves for a minute and comes back with a little glass with some amber-colored liquid in it, and Stiles' gulps it. It's brandy, and it burns all the way down. "You – you know I'm underage, right?" he says.

Stilinski grips his shoulder for a minute and says, "I'll have you know that it's not illegal to serve a minor alcohol in your own home."

"In Germany, maybe," Stiles replies, the glib reply coming from his mouth without him really thinking about it. It's nice to know that his smartassery is apparently automatic.

They sit in silence for a minute.

"Son," Stilinski finally says, and Stiles flinches away just from the _word_, the word that means they're going to have to talk about this, even though his father likes talking about emotional things even less than he does. "Whatever . . ." He falters for a minute, but clears his throat and comes back strong. "Whatever he did to you . . . you can talk to me about it. You can tell me. It's okay."

Now Stiles feels the tears burn at his eyes, and he can't hold them back anymore. He hopes that his father won't notice. He knows that Beacon Hills is a small town without much crime, but that doesn't mean his father is ignorant of the sort of things that can happen in the wider world. He knows that his father's imagination is running rampant with all the horrible possibilities that a kidnapped teenager might endure at the hands of an older, stronger man.

But the truth is worse.

"He . . . he didn't _do_ anything to me, Dad," Stiles says. "He barely even _touched_ me. He just roughed me up a bit. It's . . . that's the worst part." The lump in his throat is so huge that he can barely talk around it. "He didn't have to hurt me, because I just did what he wanted."

Stilinski squeezes his shoulder again. "You know that's not a bad thing, right? That . . ." Now he's the one who has trouble talking. "That's probably the reason you're alive."

"No, Dad, I'm alive because you were smart enough to look for the nurse's car," and because Chris Argent has pretty good aim, he adds silently, but doesn't think he should say that out loud. "He left me to _die_." Now he's freaking out, he can't help it, the sobs are clawing their way out of his throat no matter how hard he tries to hold them back. He draws his knees up to his chest and hopes that his father isn't looking at him, but he knows he is. "I did everything he wanted, I sold out my friends to him, and then he just left me to die."

His father isn't a man of many words under normal circumstances, and emotional circumstances make things even worse. So he just puts an arm around Stiles' shoulder and holds onto him for a few minutes, until the worst of it has passed. He's quiet for a long time afterwards, too, and when he finally shifts and clears his throat, Stiles knows that he's going to say something stupid, because that's the way his father is. It's endearing, really. But it's going to be stupid. It's going to have something to do with his mother, or a suggestion about maybe seeing a counselor, or anything, really, the possibilities are endless when his father and emotions are involved.

So he pretends that he's fallen asleep because he just doesn't want to hear whatever his father has to say. His father looks down at him and lets out a little sigh, and doesn't say anything at all. After a few more minutes, he lays Stiles down and tucks him in; Stiles remains appropriately limp through all of this, just like a sleeping person would. Stilinski turns out the light and leaves the room, leaving the door ajar. Stiles waits until he hears his father's bedroom door open and shut before leaping out of bed to turn the lights back on. Not just the bedside lamp, but the overhead light, too. Then he reaches for his bottle of Adderall. There is no way he's going back to sleep; he's going to make absolutely sure of that.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

The next day is uneventful. Stiles is up first, because he hasn't gone to bed, and he's downstairs eating a bowl of cereal by the time his father gets up for the day. Stilinski runs to the school to get Stiles' make-up work packet, so Stiles has plenty to keep himself occupied with. The Adderall helps.

He remembers, rather vividly, an occasion in his freshman year when someone tried to buy his Adderall off of him. He had looked at the kid like he was nuts and said, "Fuck you, I don't take it to get high, I need this shit." Which was true. Stiles without his Adderall is a sight that nobody really wants to see. That wasn't to say that he didn't abuse it occasionally, like when he had important werewolf research to do or bad dreams to avoid.

So he dives right into chemistry and economics and history, and by the time the school day is over, he's written an eight page paper on women's suffrage, which is at least loosely connected to the topic he's _supposed_ to be writing a paper on, which is Genghis Khan. They're both history subjects, at least; he's gotten better grades for dumber ideas. It takes a while to get used to typing with the pinky and ring finger on his left hand in a splint, but he adapts.

He texts back and forth with Scott during the day – Allison's wearing a low-cut shirt and Scott is incoherent for the first three periods – and talks his friend out of skipping lacrosse practice to come check on him. Because he's fine. He's got music blaring and calculus derivations (despite the fact that he doesn't take calculus) to keep him company. Everything's cool; he's cool, and then someone outside blares a car horn and he practically has to peel himself off the ceiling.

After pacing around the house for a few minutes, he texts his dad. 'Any news on Peter Hale?'

Nearly ten minutes go by before his father responds, 'Nothing yet. We've got the dogs out looking for him.'

Stiles thinks that if Derek can't find him, the dogs sure as shit won't be able to. He paces more. Then he texts his dad to ask, 'Anything I can do?'

This time the response comes back almost immediately. 'You okay?'

'Sure, I'm fine, just bored,' Stiles lies.

'Do your homework,' his father responds.

So Stiles goes back to writing his women's suffrage paper and adds a section on the fifteenth amendment, which gave black men the vote, tying it all together into the civil rights moment and then somehow segueing into gay marriage, because hey, why not? His fingers ache from all the typing by the time his dad gets home, but at least he's had his ass in a chair all day, with a eleven page paper to prove it, so Stilinski is happy with him and gets ice cream to celebrate. They watch Fievel Goes West and then Stiles surfs Tumblr and Reddit until his father goes to bed.

He's prepared to abuse more Adderall and stay up all night, but falls asleep in front of his computer with his head slumped down onto the desk. That's probably a good thing, because it means when the nightmares start, he wakes up when he falls out of the chair, before he can start screaming and wake his dad. He dreams about Peter climbing in through his window and saying, "I need you in the pack, Stiles, I need the pack to be stronger." He dreams about being chased through the forest by Scott and Derek, wolfed out and terrifying. He dreams about cradling Lydia's cold body in his arms, watching her glassy eyes stare at nothing until they go blank. The dreams are disjointed, hopping from one nightmare to the next until he finally lurches awake and bruises his tailbone when he falls out of the chair.

It's three AM, the witching hour, and the house would be deathly quiet if it weren't for the fact that his iPod is still playing. He hears a creaking noise above him and pauses the music. For the next ten minutes, he sits there on the floor, holding his knees to his chest, shaking silently. Cold sweat beads on his forehead. He can't think, can't concentrate, can't move, can't do _anything_ other than sit there and strain his ears for any other noise and wonder if he's about to die, or worse.

When he hears another creak, he nearly loses his shit. He springs to his feet and leaves his room, grabs a flashlight and a baseball bat (he's heard from the McCall family that they're the top line in homeowner defense) and creeps down the hallway to the attic stairs. His logical side tells him to get his father, the one with a firearm, but there's no way he's going to wake his father over what's probably nothing. It's just his overactive imagination getting the best of him, too little sleep and too much ice cream.

So he goes up by himself, the light cast by the flashlight wobbling madly in his shaking hands. He opens the attic door to see Peter crouched over a figure slumped on the ground. There's no white dress this time, no sprawl of strawberry blonde hair, just a gray T-shirt stained with blood and his father's arm, flung out like he had tried to reach for his gun. Peter looks up at him with that blank expression, blood running down his chin –

And Stiles screams himself awake again.

It takes nearly an hour to calm him down, and the next morning, both Stilinskis are sleep deprived and surly. Stilinski hesitantly asks if he should stay home, and Stiles replies, at least partially truthfully, that he's fine during the day. It's only at night that he's having problems. Stilinski doesn't exactly like it, but he wants to keep his job, so he goes to work.

That's good, because Stiles is done with this shit. He's done being the weak one; he's done being afraid. If he had just let Peter bite him, none of this would have happened. He grabs the spare key for the Jeep that his father keeps, and drives out to the Hale house.

He's not sure how Derek always happens to be there whenever they show up. He doubts that Derek actually lives there. Not only would it be extremely depressing, but the place is falling apart. It wouldn't keep rain out, and it's not like it has electricity or running water. But Derek _is_ always there when one or more of them show up, and this is no exception. He meets Stiles on the front porch, giving him a look that almost seems curious.

"Still haven't found him?" Stiles asks, and Derek just shrugs in reply. Stiles huffs out a breath and then folds his arms over his chest. He's not sure about this, not sure at all, but he's just tired of being afraid, so he blurts it out. "I want you to bite me."

Derek's eyebrows go all the way up to his hairline, and Stiles realizes that there's more than one way to take that, and feels a blush coloring his cheeks. He clarifies, hastily. "No, I mean, I want you to turn me into a werewolf."

"No, you don't," Derek says. His tone is dismissive, and then he does just that: turns and walks into the house without another word.

Stiles follows him. "Yes, I do."

"No," Derek says, and turns. "You don't. You don't want to be a werewolf. Because if you wanted to be a werewolf, you would have let Peter turn you."

"Maybe I just didn't want that asshole to be my alpha," Stiles says.

Derek shakes his head and says, "Or maybe you were still freaked out by watching everything Scott went through, and having to chain him to a radiator to keep him from killing you. No, Stiles, you don't want the bite. You're just frightened, and it's coloring your judgment. Find some better coping mechanisms." He points to the door.

"You know what, Derek?" Stiles says. "You are a great big bag of dicks."

Much to his surprise, Derek actually smiles a little at that. "Now there's the Stiles I want to see," he said. "C'mon, I'll drive you home."

"I brought the Jeep," Stiles says. "Dad has a spare key."

"Okay," Derek says, "then you can drive yourself home, and I'll follow you to make sure that's where you actually go."

Stiles suspects that there's an underlying 'to make sure you get home safely' in there somewhere, but it's something he just doesn't want to tackle. He gives Derek the finger and leaves the stupid Hale house with its stupid lack of roof and its stupid musty interior. He gets behind the wheel of the Jeep and drives straight home with stupid Derek Hale and his stupid black sports car tailing him the whole way. Derek even waits until he's gotten out of the Jeep and gone into the house.

Well, fine, screw him anyway. Stiles takes some Adderall and looks around for something to do.

* * *

By four o'clock, the house is the cleanest it's been in over a year. Stiles even moves the furniture so he can vacuum underneath it. Adderall and coffee are an amazing combination; if he had had the materials, he probably would have built a house-cleaning robot to do the work for him. He had done this after his mother died, when he needed something to do and his father obviously wasn't going to learn how to scrub toilets any time soon.

Since the house is pretty much sparkling, he turns his attention towards the prospect of dinner even though he's not really hungry. He gets that way when he's taken lots of Adderall; sometimes he'll forget to eat for days and then wake up to find he's made and consumed sandwiches in his sleep. There's a couple pounds of hamburger in the fridge, and Stiles ponders it for a few minutes. He's a pretty decent cook, since that's another thing his father had never really learned. His mother hadn't been weak or stupid by any means, but she was happy being a housewife, and things like that were her domain. Since Stiles was a growing boy, he put up with the half-assed meals his father put on the table until he could be trusted to work the stove on his own. Then he started figuring things out by himself.

He rummages around and finds onions and garlic, two avocados, and a bunch of tomatoes. After a moment of consideration, he texts Scott and says, 'You want dinner? I'm making tacos.'

Scott can pretty much always be trusted to eat, so Stiles isn't surprised to receive the affirmative response. Then he gets, 'Can I bring Allison? She's avoiding her parents.'

There's plenty of hamburger, so Stiles responds, 'Sure. Can you pick up some tortillas and cheese on the way? I'll pay you back.'

'np,' Scott replies, so Stiles goes back to chopping onions and garlic. His mind wanders, as it always does. To keep it from wandering to unpleasant topics, he occupies himself by turning the TV on in the living room and turning the volume up loud so he can hear it. There's hockey on TV, and he's not a huge hockey fan, but at least it's something to listen to.

It backfires on him when Scott shows up, and he doesn't hear the door open. Scott never rings the bell at his place, just like he never rings the bell at Scott's. So he's just chopping lettuce and he turns around and Scott's _there_, in the doorway. Stiles jumps about three feet in the air and swipes out with the knife without thinking. Scott raises his hands to defend himself and catches a glancing blow across his palm. The knife isn't super sharp, but it's not exactly dull, either, and it opens up a sizable wound on Scott's hand. Both of them stare at it in some surprise as it heals, and then Stiles realizes what he just did, and realizes that if it had been Allison, or his father, he could have really hurt somebody.

"Hey, uh, you okay?" Scott asks, despite the very obvious answer.

Stiles leans against the counter. His chest is tight again; he can feel his heart jackhammering in his chest. He's suddenly certain that he's having a heart attack, that he's actually being frightened to death. He takes in a wheezing, whining gasp for air, but his windpipe has narrowed down to the size of a pinhole. He can't breathe. He squeezes his eyes shut and thinks that maybe he can just disappear, and nobody will witness his humiliation.

Then Scott's arm is around his waist, and before he can freak out, Scott jams a piece of plastic into his mouth and says, "Breathe." Stiles tries, automatically, and then there's a cloud of medicine in his mouth, and he pulls away. His gagging and gasping turns into hacking and choking.

He recovers a moment later, mostly because his surprise at what just happened jolts him out of the panic. "Did you," he says, his voice raw, and has to stop and get a drink of water. "Did you just give me a puff from your inhaler?"

Scott shrugs somewhat sheepishly and says, "It worked for me when I was having a panic attack."

Stiles thinks of all the different things that are wrong with that logic, but then realizes that Scott will just say 'hey, it worked' if he points any of them out. So he lets it go, because it did work, and there are more important things to focus on, like whether or not he can crawl underneath the sofa and pretend none of this happened.

They stare at each other for a moment before Scott says, "Oh, uh, Allison's getting the groceries. I didn't have any money, so she said she would drop by the store. She'll be here in a little while."

"Oh," Stiles says. "Okay. Great."

Another long moment of awkward silence. "Look, um . . ." Scott says.

"No," Stiles says firmly. "We are not talking about this." He turns back to the lettuce with hands that are shaking too badly to continue work, and thinks that maybe he should get a new knife; he doesn't know if lycanthropy can be transmitted through blood or anything like that. "I've just had too much Adderall and it's made me a little jumpy. No big."

Scott lets out a breath. "Stiles, you just _stabbed_ me. I don't think that's the kind of thing we can avoid talking about. I, I know you're all freaked out about Peter still being missing, but – "

"No!" Stiles shouts, surprising both of them. "No, you _don't_ know. There's no _way_ that you can know, because, because you're strong enough that even if you can't fight him, at least you can get away. There was _nothing_ I could do to get away from him, and you can't possibly understand that – " the words are tumbling out so fast that he can't stop them – "so spare me your bullshit sympathy! We are not talking about this, because I am fine, God dammit, I _have_ to be fine, so just leave me the fuck alone!"

"But you _don't_ have to be fine," Scott says in frustration. "Why don't you get that? Look, man, I, I'm not good with words, okay? I know that. But, but I'm here for you, whatever you need, okay? And if you're embarrassed or something, something stupid like that, you shouldn't be. Because you saw _me_ at my lowest, okay, remember? You had to hose me down with a fire extinguisher, and chain me to a radiator, and help me when I had a stupid panic attack, and you did all of it without complaining, you did anything I needed, even when it was chuck lacrosse balls at me or forgive me for making out with Lydia or stealing a pedometer for me – " It wasn't a pedometer, but Stiles figures that this isn't the time to point that out. "So for Christ's sake, _let me help you._"

Abruptly, Stiles finds himself sitting on the kitchen floor. "How – how can you even want me near you after what I did? After I gave you up to Peter like that?"

"How can you want _me_ near you, after I left the two of you at that party and ran off?" Scott counters. "Man, maybe we both did some dumb shit, right? But if you hadn't helped Peter, I don't want to think about what he would have done to you. I'd rather you be alive and, and have helped him than you be loyal and dead."

The earnestness in his tone breaks something open inside Stiles that he hadn't realized was there. He opens his mouth to spill everything at Scott's feet, how helpless he felt, how he hated being weak, how he refused Peter's offer of the bite and wishes he hadn't but at the same time is glad he did. Then the door bangs open and Allison calls out, "Yoohoo, we're here!" and the moment is gone. But before she comes in, Stiles reaches out and grabs Scott by the forearm, gripping it tightly, letting Scott know that it did help, that he feels better. Some of the tension leaks out of his body as Scott stands up to greet Allison with his usual doofy grin.

Then he says, "We?" and sees Lydia come in behind Allison. She's a little pale, still, and her arm is bandaged, but she looks all right. He scrambles to his feet and nearly falls over. "Hey, uh, hey Lydia. Hi, Allison."

"Hi, Stiles," Allison says, with that bright smile of hers that makes her so beautiful.

"You, uh, you look great," Stiles says to Lydia, wondering why she's there, wondering why nobody _warned_ him, because he's still wearing the same old jeans and T-shirt that he's been cleaning the house in. Crawling under the sofa seems like a better and better option.

She gives a little head toss, and then says, "Given the circumstances."

"I hope you don't mind," Allison says to Stiles. "It's just, we were hanging out together when Scott asked me, so I thought . . ."

"No, no, it's fine," Stiles says. "Lydia is always welcome in the Stilinski house." He attempts to give her a suave grin, which she meets with a haughty stare that's not quite up to standard. He supposes that she, too, has her own psychological scars from what happened on the lacrosse field. "Uh, groceries," he adds, and accepts the bag from Allison. "Let's get cooking."

Scott turns the hockey game off, and for a while everything is completely normal and surprisingly okay. Stiles cooks, and forbids Scott from helping, so Allison helps instead, mashing an avocado or two for the guacamole, cutting up the tomatoes and the lettuce while Stiles tends the taco meat. Allison and Scott are making calf eyes at each other as usual, and Lydia actually chips into the conversation like a real human being on occasion. She seems a bit flighty, but okay. Stiles recovers his grasp of smartassery when Scott leaves him the perfect opening for a terrible joke, and the house is filled with light and laughter. Sheriff Stilinski gets home around six, the usual hour, and if he's surprised to find his house full of people, seeing Stiles on his feet and smiling is well worth it.

Still, some things need to be said. "Weren't you supposed to be taking it easy, Stiles?" he asks, as he's assembling his second taco.

"Yeah, so what," Stiles said, just barely remembering that Lydia is there and he should swallow before he talks.

Stilinski looks around the house somewhat pointedly. "Looks like you were on your feet all day, cleaning."

"Pssh," Stiles says, as if that's an adequate response.

"Oh, no, we all helped," Scott says quickly, jumping to his rescue.

Stilinski looks at him with narrowed eyes. "You. Came over. And helped my son clean the house."

"Yes," Scott says, decisively. Allison gives Sheriff Stilinski a wide-eyed, innocent look, and nods at him. She elbows Lydia, and she nods, too. Stiles thinks that his friends are the best, that they're just warming the shit out of the cockles of his heart.

Stilinski decides to let it go. "I'm sure your mother will be thrilled to hear that you actually know how to clean, Scott," he says, and digs into his second taco.

They polish off pretty much all the food on the table, and then Allison reveals that she bought a package of Oreos at the store, and they have a competition for who could fit the most Oreos in their mouth at once, which Lydia refuses to take part in (but Stiles catches her quietly experimenting later anyway). They play video games for a while and Allison proves that she's just as good at Wii bowling as she is at physical bowling. By then it's getting late, and Allison and Scott have school the next day – Lydia, like Stiles, has the whole week off – so everyone departs.

Stiles feels okay, he really does, for the first time since the dance, so he showers and decides to go to bed. But as soon as he's in bed, the fear of nightmares returns. He berates himself for this, but it isn't going away, and he's aware that at this point he desperately needs sleep. The house is silent; his father has been in bed for at least an hour.

He picks up a pillow and a blanket and slinks down the hallway to his father's room, moving as quietly as he can. He doesn't count on the fact that his father hasn't been sleeping much better than he has, and wakes up the instant that Stiles goes into his room. "What are you doing in here?" he asks, turning on the bedside lamp.

"Uh . . ." Stiles' tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth for a moment. "Checking for sleep apnea? I read that it's most common in middle-aged men, and, well . . ."

Stilinski stares at him for a moment in the warm pool of light, then lifts up the blankets and says, "Get in."

Stiles dumps his blanket and pillow on the floor and crawls into the bed next to his father, who reaches over and shuts out the light. It's not too dark in his father's room, though; there's a street light right outside and the orange glow comes in around the curtains. The semi-darkness makes it easier to talk, somehow. After a moment of silence, Stilinski says, "I never even had to draw my gun the first two years I was on the force. Did you know that?"

"No, Dad, I didn't," Stiles says.

"It's a pretty quiet area, all things considered," Stilinski says. "Tickets for speeders and the occasional robbery. You rarely see a crime in progress or chase anyone down on foot. The last six months have been more excitement than the six years before that. Then, all of a sudden, there was a string of carjackings. We cornered the guy at a Circle K, and he took the cashier and a customer hostage. He refused to wait until a negotiator arrived, so I went in to try to talk him down. I spent five minutes staring into the barrel of his gun, until he finally put it down."

"Sounds pretty scary," Stiles says.

"It was," his father replies. "I had nightmares for weeks afterwards. Even rethought my decision to be a cop from my reaction to it. But an older guy told me that it can just be like that sometimes. Everyone gets scared. The fear doesn't make you weak. I didn't get hurt, nobody shot at me, nothing like that. It was just . . . looking down his gun. Realizing that there are people out there who really will hurt you." He's quiet for a minute, then says, "I guess my point is that I think you're handling this really well. Don't get down on yourself, okay?"'

Stiles heaves a sigh, and cuddles closer to his father. It's dark; he can do that. They'll never speak of it again. "Okay." He thinks things over for a minute. Thinks about what Derek said. "Will you teach me how to shoot a gun?"

He feels, more than hears, his father's surprise. Stiles has never showed any interest in that sort of thing, even though he's been forced to hear all the gun safety lectures and there are plenty of hunters in their area. "Sure," he says. "I'll take you down to the firing range after work tomorrow."

"Thanks," Stiles says. Better coping mechanisms, he tells himself. He falls asleep with his cheek pressed into his father's shoulder, and although it doesn't keep the nightmares away completely, when he wakes up, he's able to do it without screaming, and go back to sleep afterwards without waking his father up.


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: I really wish that the werewolves in the show could transform into actual wolves. That would just be so awesome. Apparently I'm not the only author who pretends that they totally can. =D_

_Also, I'm kind of making some stuff up about how the alpha position is inherited and how packs work, because let's face it, as much as we all love Teen Wolf, some of this shit is just not explained very well/at all._

* * *

Stiles' plan is to go to school the next day, whether he's supposed to or not. He's done with the make-up work packet, and doesn't really want to sit around the house with nothing to do. But when he tries to get up, his body stages an immediate rebellion. Apparently his father was correct, and cleaning the entire house the day before had not been a good idea. This leaves him in a somewhat grouchy mood.

He texts back and forth with Scott until their jerk chemistry teacher yells at him and takes his phone away, which annoys Stiles although he supposes that he shouldn't be encouraging Scott to goof off in school. His grades had been decent up until the werewolf debacle, and they had talked about applying to some of the same colleges although neither of them really had a clue what they wanted to do with their lives. He thinks about staging a grades intervention for Scott, or maybe just doing some of his homework for him.

Since schoolwork is out, he goes online and reads about guns and shooting and different ways to kill werewolves. He had wondered for a while why the Argent family used wolfsbane-laced bullets instead of silver bullets, and finds out that silver bullets are actually impractical because silver melts at a much lower temperature than steel. Silver is a softer metal, too, easier to deform. Some werewolf hunters use steel knives with a notch filled with silver, which he finds interesting. But he's not a big guy and not very athletic, despite his unappreciated prowess at lacrosse, so he decides guns are the way to go.

He's also interested to find that wolfsbane isn't only poisonous to werewolves; aconite is lethal to humans as well. He supposes that it's probably a difference in dosages. It's used in medicine and a quick Google search reveals a place to buy seeds. He thinks about it, then bookmarks the site and closes the tab. Maybe later.

By the time his father comes home with a bucket of KFC, Stiles has a million questions about the weight of different guns and what sort would be best for him, how some bullets are faster than others and how long it takes to get good at this sort of thing. He peppers his father with these questions while his mouth is full of chicken and biscuits, and Stilinski answers them because he's used to this sort of behavior from his son, really.

They drive down to the firing range and Stiles gets clear plastic goggles and gigantic blue headphones and he gives his father a rather goofy grin. Stilinski snaps a picture of him with his cell phone. Stiles can't really blame him. He supposes that his disinterest in firearms has disappointed his father, who likes his guns. Not in a bad way, but still. The man likes his guns.

He's heard all the lectures before, but now he gets them again, one more time. Don't point the gun at anyone you're not willing to shoot, don't be willing to shoot unless you're willing to kill. Don't point the gun at walls or ceilings or anything a bullet could ricochet off of. Don't put your finger on the trigger unless you're prepared to fire. Don't fire into the air; he doesn't care how much Stiles loves _Point Break_. The lecture takes about ten minutes, and he nods through all of it.

Then his father goes through what the different parts of the gun are called and Stiles knows all this shit because of his reading, but he listens to it anyway. Then they move on to firing stance. Stilinski shows him where his feet should go, how his shoulders should be arranged, elbows, wrists, the whole deal. Once his stance is perfect, Stilinski has him shake out of it and then get back into it to see if he remembers. He does that three or four times until he has it correct without help. Then they work on his grip, which according to his father, is even more important than stance. Stiles feels pretty good about this, he is on top of this shit, they move on to aiming and then he fires his first bullet. It knocks him backwards into his father, who's standing behind him to brace him, and the bullet goes absolutely nowhere near the target. He lets out a whoop of laughter; the whole thing seems ridiculous. His father laughs, too.

He gets through the entire clip before he even hits the target, and even then he only manages to clip the shoulder. Still, his father is nodding approvingly, so it doesn't bother him that much. He takes a break while his father shows him how to load the gun and talks to him about, when he unloads it, to always make sure he checks for a bullet in the chamber.

By the end of the session, he can hit the target two out of every three times, and even if his aim won't kill a person, let alone a werewolf, it would at least slow them down enough for him to run like hell. He feels pretty satisfied, all things considered.

"So when do I get a gun?" he asks, as they drive home.

Stilinski gives him a look, and then sighs. "Son," he says, "you're a little too twitchy for me to start buying you firearms."

"Hey, no, I'm handling this really well, remember? You said so," Stiles responds, perhaps a bit smugly.

"Yes, yes you are," Stilinski says, clearly not ready to budge an inch on the firearms issue.

Stiles lets it go, because he already knows where his father keeps his guns, and the keys to the lockboxes, even the ones that he thinks Stiles doesn't know about. So he just goes home and pretends that everything is normal and listens to Scott bitch over skype about that bastard Harris confiscating his phone, and Allison's upset because Kate's funeral is Sunday, and how they're going to totally kick ass at the lacrosse game tomorrow, and Stiles is going to be there, right? Stiles is noncommittal on this subject because he finds himself strangely unwilling to go anywhere near the lacrosse field ever again, and just says he'll see how his dad feels about it. Then he goes to bed.

He wakes up at about half past one after a bad dream and he's too jumpy to get back to sleep. The house is completely silent. He sneaks downstairs and into the garage, takes the key to the lockbox from where it's tucked away in one of the cubbies. His dad has a hunting rifle and a second handgun. Stiles isn't sure why he needs a second handgun, since he has his service pistol, but he's glad of it right now since he hasn't learned about shooting a rifle. He takes it and a handful of bullets up to his room. Once it's loaded, he tucks it away in his bedside table drawer, and goes back to sleep feeling reassured.

But when he wakes again, this time he's sure he heard a noise. Just a soft thump, could have been anything, but whatever it is, he doesn't like it. He slides the gun out of his bedside drawer and then hears it again, coming from outside his window. He inches the curtains back slowly and sees a dark figure crouched on the roof like a gargoyle. His heart leaps into his throat and he carefully slides the window up.

Now matter how quietly he does it, it's not quiet enough to escape werewolf ears. The figure looks over at him and Derek's sharp glare comes into focus. Stiles lets out a gasping sigh of relief and then hisses, "What the hell are you doing here? I almost shot you!"

Derek frowns at him. "Where did you get a gun?"

"Are you serious?" Stiles asks. "My father's the sheriff; you think we don't have guns in the house?"

For some reason, Derek takes this as, 'please come in, Derek, I'm so glad to see you.' He pushes Stiles out of the way and climbs in through the window. Stiles gives him a frustrated look but doesn't try to stop him, because really, such an act would be doomed for failure. Derek has a way of getting what he wants by either bulldozing opposition or simply pretending said opposition isn't there.

"Seriously," he says instead, "what are you doing here?"

Derek folds his arms over his chest and resumes glaring. "Scott said that you were worried that Peter might come after you."

"What?" Stiles hisses. Had he said that? Or had Scott just somehow figured it out? Scott does have the ability to be intuitive, usually at all the wrong moments. He's too irritated at Derek to feel afraid right now, which he supposes is good, since otherwise he thinks he'd feel a chill at that statement. "What, do – do you think he will?"

"No," Derek says. "He's got no reason to."

"So . . . why are you here?" Stiles asks again. "Because either you're here lying in wait for Peter to show up, or . . . you're here to pander to me? Which doesn't seem like you, and also, if you were going to 'stand guard' or some shit, you know it doesn't work to make me feel better when I don't know that you're doing it, right?"

Derek just gives Stiles one of his typical long-suffering looks. "Scott didn't want me to tell you. He seems to think your dignity might be at stake."

"Since when do you listen to what Scott thinks?" Stiles rolls his eyes. "You're here because you can't find Peter, and because any idea is better than none, so let's stake out poor, traumatized Stiles' house and freak him out in the middle of the night. What a great idea! Go away, Derek."

Derek doesn't go away, which doesn't surprise Stiles one bit, so he decides to ignore his presence. But he unloads the gun, because his father was very clear about not leaving the gun loaded if he didn't plan to use it. He even checks for a bullet in the chamber, though he's pretty sure he never chambered one. Derek watches him do this with some interest, then says, with his typical tact, "You know that wouldn't stop Peter, right?"

Stiles sets the gun down and thins his lips. "No, but it would slow him down long enough to give me the chance to scream like a little girl, which is about all you seem to think I'm good for."

Derek doesn't argue with this, which only annoys Stiles more.

"Why are you so sure he's still alive, anyway?" Stiles asks, though he's not sure he wants to know. "Wolfsbane bullets. Three of them. Remember?"

Derek shifts and says, "He's alive. I'm not the alpha yet."

"I thought _you_ had to kill him to become the alpha," Stiles says.

"It depends," Derek says. "That's what I thought, before I found out that he killed Laura. Laura was my alpha. So now Peter is. But I would have inherited the position, through the family line, if Laura had been killed by anyone other than a werewolf. So now, if Peter is killed by someone other than a werewolf, I become the alpha."

Stiles thinks all this over and says, "So you never intended to let Scott kill the alpha, did you? Because then Scott would be your boss. All that stuff about a possible cure, that was all bullshit."

"It wasn't bullshit," Derek says. "I never knew whether or not it would actually work, and I told Scott that. It's not my fault if he wasn't listening. And he wouldn't have necessarily been my alpha. Werewolves don't have to stay in the same pack. If they don't like their alpha, they can leave the pack and risk being Omega, alone, or they can join another pack."

Stiles throws his hands up in the air in exasperation. "Then why was Peter able to control Scott?"

"Because Peter turned Scott. And because Scott didn't have control."

"You know what, I give the fuck up," Stiles decides. "I was trying to sleep. How am I supposed to sleep with you staring at me?"

"I'll sleep, too."

Stiles doubts that, but he isn't in the mood to argue, since arguing with Derek Hale never gets him anywhere anyway. "Okay, you do that. You just . . . make yourself comfortable over there, big guy." He flops backwards and stares at the ceiling for several long minutes, listening to Derek rustle around, leaving the light on, because he doesn't care if Derek wants it off or not. When he looks up again, to check and make sure Derek isn't watching him sleep – let's face it, creepy – he sees a large, dark gray wolf curled up in the corner of his room. He sucks in a surprised breath and manages to clamp his teeth down on the yelp that almost escapes him. "Since when can you do _that_?"

The wolf raises its head and stares at him for a long minute, as if weighing the option of shifting back and answering his question against just putting his head back down and going to sleep. Then he shifts. It's a fascinating process, coming all the way from wolf back to human, and unlike the partial shifts, he ends without clothing on. Stiles realizes that the rustling noise was Derek getting undressed. He seems completely immodest, though Stiles supposes he has nothing to be ashamed of, and answers the question. "All werewolves can do this. It's the second stage shift."

"Scott can't," Stiles says.

"He can," Derek says. "He just hasn't learned how yet."

"You know," Stiles says, "he may not be quite as averse to learning from you if you told him that you could teach him something better than how to make himself look like he's from an eighties B movie." He meets Derek's glare with a shrug. "I'm just sayin'."

In response, Derek shifts back to wolf form, which makes Stiles assume that the conversation is over. A minute later, however, Derek has climbed up onto the foot of his bed and curled up there. "Oh, what, is the floor too hard for you fragile bones?" Stiles asks, glaring. "Most people wait for an invitation before they crawl into someone else's bed. Not that I'm speaking from experience."

Derek yawns at him, and okay, teeth, impressive, and then closes his eyes. Stiles huffs out a sigh, but the bed is big enough, really, and short of kicking Derek off, there isn't much he can do about it. So he lies back down and closes his eyes, leaving the light on, because fuck Derek Hale, that's why.

He's been asleep less than an hour when he has another nightmare, this one about suffocating to death in the trunk, and he wakes up gasping. Derek's wolf form is now next to him, having nudged him awake. Not even aware of what he's doing, Stiles turns and clings to that reassuring bulk, burying his face in Derek's fur until he's regained some semblance of calm. He falls asleep still leaning against him, and sleeps the rest of the night without dreaming.

The sun hits him right in the eyes the next morning, because he forgot to close his curtains before going back to bed. Derek is still sprawled out on the bed next to him in wolf form, and actually is asleep. Stiles considers this for a few minutes before easing out of bed, grabbing his camera, and snapping a quick photograph. He forwards it to Scott with a text saying 'look what Derek can do but didn't tell you about!'

Two minutes later he gets a text back that says, 'Why is Derek in your bed?'

"Okay, maybe I didn't think that one through," Stiles mutters to himself. He considers for a moment before typing back, 'Because some jackass told him I was afraid Peter was going to come after me.'

Scott apparently decides that no response is the best response.

Stiles isn't eager to have his father come in and ask what a giant wolf and/or Derek Hale is doing in his bed, so he settles for prodding Derek in the ribs until the wolf opens one sleepy eye. The glare is unmistakable, regardless of what face it's on. "Get up," Stiles says. "Unless you want my dad finding out you're in here. Because he really will shoot you."

Derek shifts forms and says, "I was cleared of all charges."

"And that will matter to my dad when he finds you in my bed, why?"

Derek glares.

"Now put on some God damned pants before I start taking pictures to bribe Danny with," Stiles says, and then sneaks a few pictures anyway, because _damn_.

"Look, uh . . ." Stiles clears his throat. "Sorry about last night. You know. The . . ." He winces but spits it out. "The hugging."

Derek just gives him a blank look.

"Oh, come on," Stiles says. "Don't make me talk about it. Just say 'don't worry about it'. _Try_ to be reassuring. Or at least not a jerk."

There's a pause. Then a sigh. "It's not a thing," Derek says, "so don't make it into one. Wolves are tactile creatures. It's very common for them to sleep in piles, close to each other."

Stiles gives him a long stare. Then he says, "You're . . . trying to convince me . . . that _you_ are a natural cuddler."

Derek isn't even glaring now. He actually rolls his eyes. "With my pack," he clarifies, stiffly.

"I'm not part of your pack," Stiles says.

"You're not a wolf," Derek agrees, "but you are part of my pack."

Stiles stares again, then says, "You know what, whatever. I think I'd rather just let you do what you want rather than continue to have this conversation."

Derek nods, as if this is as it should be.

* * *

Stiles does go to the lacrosse game, even though he doesn't want to. He was sure his father would say no, thus giving him a convenient excuse, but instead he says sure, and they go together. Stiles sits in the stands and taps his feet nervously on the ground, feeling the crowd press in on him. Lydia isn't there, but Allison is, cheering Scott on. She tells Stiles about how her father has forbidden her from seeing Scott again. Stiles can't think of a better way to guarantee that Scott will lose his virginity this month.

Chris Argent glowers from the stands. Derek is sure to be lurking somewhere. So by all standards, he's perfectly safe. Even Peter probably isn't crazy enough to try something in this gigantic crowd, most of whom know nothing about werewolves. Stiles tells himself that Peter probably skipped town. His revenge was complete, so no need to stick around, right? Especially not when crazy people with wolfsbane bullets were around.

This gives him something of an idea, but first he has to survive the lacrosse game. He feels squeezed from all sides, tight and claustrophobic. It's an effort to keep his breathing even. His father seems blessedly oblivious to his predicament. Allison, who is more sensitive than her boyfriend, reaches down and tightly grips Stiles' hand at one point. She doesn't look at him, doesn't say anything, doesn't make a show of it. Just holds his hand. He can understand why Scott fell in love with her.

Jackson is in fine form, being his usual douchey self, but Scott is ignoring him for once. They win, of course, because they're awesome. Scott waves to Allison from the field with a mile-wide grin, sees Mr. Argent, and sort of shrinks back into himself. On the whole, it's a successful evening.

Kate's funeral isn't as big a deal as it could be, because Sheriff Stilinski managed to keep the whole arson thing quiet, making it seem like Peter Hale was just some crazed serial killer who for some reason liked making his victims look like animal attack victims. Scott wants to go and support Allison, but of course her father won't let him, so instead he plans to lurk in the graveyard. Stiles wants to go and support Scott, but his father figures out what he's doing in about three seconds and forbids both of them from going anywhere near the cemetery. So instead they hang out in Stiles' bedroom and talk about how unfair their lives are. Scott tries to transform into an actual wolf without success, so they bitch about Derek for a little while, then Stiles shows him the pictures he got of Derek's naked ass and they both snicker like the immature teenagers they are and debate whether it would make them terrible people to post them on the internet, since you can't see his face, after all.

"So . . . how bad was it?" Scott finally asks.

Stiles doesn't need to ask what he's talking about. After a moment, he says, "It was bad. It was just like . . . there was _nothing_. No light, no sound. Nothing to think about. The boredom alone could have driven me crazy. And I didn't know if you were dead or alive, or if anyone would find me." He flops back onto his bed and stares at the ceiling. "It was pretty bad, man."

Scott leans against his bed, sitting on the floor, so they're not looking at each other. "Like, chain-me-to-the-radiator bad?"

"Worse," Stiles says. "A lot worse."

They're quiet for a minute.

"You know, Derek said a funny thing this morning," Stiles finally says. "He said that I was part of the pack."

"Well . . ." Scott shifts slightly. "You are, aren't you?"

"I'm not a werewolf."

"Yeah, but . . . not all the Hales were werewolves, either. Allison's dad said that. That some of the people caught in the fire had been human. I bet they still considered the humans part of the pack. So I guess you don't have to be a werewolf to be part of the pack."

"I guess." Stiles feels pretty skeptical about all this.

"Besides . . . of course you're part of the pack," Scott adds. "I mean . . . you're Stiles."

"Well, I can't deny that," Stiles says.

"You realize he's going to boss you around all the time now, right?" Scott asks. "I mean, did you _say_ that you were okay with being part of his pack?"

Stiles thinks back. "I told him I didn't want to talk about it anymore."

Scott lets out a snort of laughter. "Oh, yeah. You're screwed."

Stiles hits him over the head with a pillow.

"You know," Scott says, "this explains the text he sent me this morning." He pulls it up on his phone and shows it to Stiles. It reads, 'If Stiles can accept me as his alpha, and he's a lot smarter than you, what the hell is your problem?'

Stiles studies the text for a moment. He looks at Scott. Scott looks at him. In unison, they say, "What a dick."

"Did you reply to him yet?" Stiles asks.

"No. I ignore these little love notes he sends me."

Stiles smirks and grabs the phone, typing, 'Stiles is more man than you'll ever be,' and sending it before Scott can get the phone away from him.

"You jerk," Scott says, but he's laughing. The phone beeps, and Derek's return text is a smug, 'That's why his status in the pack will always be higher than yours.'

"Oh, now it's _on_," Stiles says, his fingers tapping away, and Scott is grabbing for the phone, but Stiles tries to keep it out of reach while his brain comes up with truly hilarious responses to Derek's taunting. But Scott is faster and stronger than he is, and manages to snatch the phone away before he can hit send. Stiles tries to get it back, because hello, best friends since grade school, this is the kind of shit they do, they're boys, they wrestle. Which is how he winds up with his face mashed into his mattress with Scott's hand on the back of his neck, freaking the fuck out.

Scott's a little dense, so he doesn't notice at first, keeping Stiles pinned while he texts Derek with God knows what, but a few seconds later it occurs to him that it's really not normal for Stiles to be making those tiny little whining noises in the back of his throat. "Whoa, shit, sorry," he says, jumping up off the bed and letting Stiles go. "You okay?"

He's not okay, he can't breathe. Intellectually, he knows he's having another panic attack. Which is all fine and dandy, but he can't break out of it. He never could, back after his mother died; sometimes his father would have to throw a glass of cold water into his face to snap him out of it. They even talked about putting him on medication for it, but he started to get better, so they didn't. His fists clench down in the blankets and he gasps for air, feeling his heart rabbiting along in his chest, just as terrified and unsteady as he is. Scott is talking to him, saying something, Stiles doesn't know what.

Then he feels a brush of fur against his hand, and he latches onto it, wrapping his arms around the wolf that's climbed up beside him, using its body to shield him from the world. Gradually, his breathing evens out, his heart rate slows. He thinks, absurdly, of how touching releases oxytocin, and how scientific studies have proven that it helps with trauma and PTSD.

When he's finally gotten himself under control, he blinks at the shaggy, dark brown wolf that's now sitting with him, and says, stupidly, "Hey. You figured it out."

The wolf blinks at him, and then looks down, as if only now figuring out that he has four paws instead of two hands and two feet. He's a little tangled up in his clothes, too, because they didn't really fall off when he shifted. He actually looks kind of ridiculous, and after a few moments, Stiles starts to laugh. It feels good, so he laughs harder.

"Shut up!" Scott says, a moment later, when he's managed to get himself back into human form, although he nearly falls because only one of his legs is in his pants. "I thought it would help, damn it, you're the one who was talking about Derek snuggling you in your bed – "

"Excuse me, there was no _snuggling_ – "

"Oh, yeah, what was it then? Cuddling? Hugging? Canoodling?"

"You know I have a gun now, right?"

Scott flops back onto the bed, still laughing at him.

Yeah, Stiles thinks, definitely part of the pack. It doesn't make any sense to him, but he's surprisingly okay with it.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

He's had dumber ideas in the course of his life, he supposes, but he's pretty sure that everyone he knows would be screaming at him if they knew where he currently is. Which is precisely why nobody does. His father is at work. Scott is at lacrosse practice, and Allison is ostensibly staying after school for French club but undoubtedly will wind up watching the practice.

His reentry into school was pretty much a non-event. Nobody knew where he was or how he was involved in any of what had happened, and his father had told the school he was sick with pneumonia. Even if they had known, his entry would have been dwarfed by Lydia's. No one can help knowing what happened to her, since Jackson had carried her back to the dance covered in blood, and everyone is staring at her. She's not in the cafeteria at lunch. Stiles finds her hiding in a stairwell, and sits down with her. He's happier out of the press of the crowd, too. They don't talk about it, though. They just sit and eat. He gives her half of his apple and slices it for her. Barely a word is spoken the whole time. It's probably the first time he's been comfortable in Lydia's presence.

He gets all his make-up work turned in without a problem, except when Harris tries to refuse to accept it, saying that he had made it clear that it needed to be in _first thing_ Monday, not 'whenever you happen to wander into my class room on Monday'. Stiles points out that he 'wandered in' during the period known as 'chemistry class'. Harris dumps it in the trash can. Stiles sends Danny a low-res picture of Derek's ass with a text that says 'so you can hack the school computers and get me an A in chemistry, right?' Danny replies that this will not be a problem. Stiles sends the high-res version.

Then school is over and he takes off. His father has gotten him new keys for the Jeep, and Stiles feels like things have gone extremely well. No freak-outs. He's one hundred percent recovered. Now he needs to move from 'recovered' to 'able to protect himself so this never happens again', which is why he's currently standing on the Argent's front doorstep.

After a moment to consider everything and rehearse what he intends to say, he rings the bell, and hopes that Mr. Argent answers. He's scary enough, but he's scary in a hard way, a tough way, not scary in that ice cold way that Mrs. Argent is. Stiles doesn't even know what to make of her, and he doesn't want to spend time with her unless absolutely necessary.

Luck is with him; Chris Argent answers the door. He looks at Stiles for a few moments before recognition sets in, and then he says, "Allison isn't home right now."

"I know," Stiles says. "I was hoping to talk to you, actually."

Argent's eyes narrow. "If this is some plea on Scott's behalf, you can keep it."

"Nope," Stiles says. "This trip is business."

Argent clearly isn't sure what to make of that, but he opens the door the rest of the way and lets Stiles in. "Stiles, right?" he asks, and Stiles nods. "Allison's told me some about you. What is it that you're doing here?"

Stiles folds his arms over his chest and says, "I would like to purchase a gun from you."

"You . . ." Of all the things that Argent was expecting, this clearly is not one of them. "Do you even know how to handle a gun?"

"Why do people keep asking me that?" Stiles asks. "My father is the _sheriff_. Yes, I know how to handle a gun. And I'm really sick of being the one who's tossed around because I hang out with a rough crowd."

"There's a solution to that," Argent says.

Stiles lets out a sigh. "Look," he says, "even if I said I would stop being friends with Scott, at this point it's a little too late to get uninvolved in this shit. Peter Hale is still out there somewhere, and although I'll admit the odds are extremely slim that he'll bother with coming after me, I'd like to sleep safe and secure in the knowledge that if he _does_, I'll have a gun and some wolfsbane bullets I can chase him off with. I'm not dicking you around. I have money." Which is true. Stiles has a fairly lucrative business selling papers online to college students, usually papers he's already written for no reason other than that he felt like writing them and he's had too much Adderall. Also: gold farming.

"That's not the issue," Argent says. He gives Stiles a penetrating look, then says, "You seem like a good kid, Stiles, and I'm sorry for what happened to you. That's why we exist as hunters – to protect people like you. You've got balls and you've got brains. If I didn't have serious doubts about your loyalty, I would even think about asking you to join our ranks. But these are tools, not toys, and I'm not going to sell you anything."

"Yeah, you've done a bang-up job at protecting the people around here so far," Stiles retorts. "Peter Hale killed how many people, and meanwhile, you guys did . . . what? You shot Derek, who hadn't done anything wrong. You shot Scott, who hadn't done anything wrong. Oh, and all this was precipitated by your crazy sister burning a bunch of people alive. Let's not forget that. Because Peter Hale certainly won't."

A muscle in Argent's jaw twitches. "Peter Hale is dead," he says.

"No, he's not," Stiles says.

"We took care of him," Argent says. "After Scott was hurt, Allison and Derek took him back to the clinic in town. I tracked down Peter. He was wounded. He hadn't gotten far." He reaches out as if to squeeze Stiles' shoulder, but then decides against it. "We took care of him. He's not going to hurt you, or anyone else, ever again."

Stiles gives him a look and says, "How fucking stupid do you think I am?"

Argent frowns. "Pardon?"

"Peter's not dead. If Peter were dead, Derek would be an alpha, because Peter killed Laura, so the alpha position should have reverted to Derek if Peter were killed by anyone who wasn't another werewolf. And he's not an alpha. So your misguided attempt to ease my mind is appreciated but ultimately pointless." There's a brief moment of silence, and then Stiles pinches the bridge of his nose and says, "Shit, you didn't know that, did you."

"I'm not selling you firearms, Stiles," Argent says. "You're underage. Now go home."

"No, you know, I don't think we're done having this discussion," Stiles says, and then Argent grabs him by the shoulder. His grip is hard, and painful, and Stiles has to swallow the panic that immediately bubbles up in his throat. He tells himself firmly that there is no way he's letting this asshole see him get scared. But he doesn't try to fight as Argent hauls him out the front door and then gives him a little shove. The door slams in his face as he starts to turn around. "Yeah, well, fuck you," he says to the door, and makes a mental note to buy Scott and Allison condoms.

While he's at it, he'll order some seeds to grow his own wolfsbane. He can take care of himself without help from anybody else.

* * *

Stilinski is working night shift, despite the fact that he doesn't want to. There's been a higher than average number of accidents lately. It _is_ winter, and despite the fact that they're in California, the roads can get slippery, but because of the fact that they're in California, nobody realizes that. He's reluctant to leave Stiles at home on his own, but Stiles reminds him that he conquered the school day with complete success and it's time to tackle something more difficult.

"Just don't shoot anybody," Stilinski says, revealing the fact that he totally knows that Stiles has taken his gun from the lockbox.

"Roger that," Stiles says. What he doesn't say is that he knows damned well he's not going to be spending the night alone. Scott had stayed the night before, despite it being a school night, and like Derek, had slept in his wolf form at the foot of Stiles' bed. They will never speak of this in daylight. It's a guy thing. In any case, Stiles is sure that one of the two of them will show up that night.

His father leaves around nine. Stiles finishes his homework and takes a shower, then goes into his bedroom, slides the window open, and looks around. Sure enough, Derek is lurking. Stiles waves him inside and says, "You know, some day I'm going to teach you how to use doors like a normal person."

"I'm not a normal person," Derek says, with a smile that shows teeth.

"Thanks for the update, Dan Rather," Stiles says. Derek gives him a blank look. Stiles decides against explaining the reference and flops onto his bed with a comic book. He waits for Derek to stop staring at him and sit down somewhere, or shift into his wolf form, or do anything other than continue to glare, really. This goes on for several minutes. Stiles puts the comic down with a huff. "What?"

"Why were you at the Argents?"

"What, really?" Stiles gives him a look. "Are you stalking me?"

"I'm protecting you. Why were you at the Argents?"

Since lying to werewolves gets him absolutely nowhere, Stiles says, "Because my dad won't buy me a gun, and even if he did it wouldn't have wolfsbane bullets, so I went there to conduct a business transaction." He lifts the comic book back up so he won't have to look at Derek glowering at him.

A moment later, Derek snatches it out of his hands. "Those people are dangerous."

"No shit, really?" Stiles asks, feigning shock. "I never would have guessed the people I went to buy a _deadly weapon_ from are dangerous. It's a good thing that you told me."

Through gritted teeth, Derek says, "Don't. Go there. Again."

"Uh, newsflash for you, Derek: you don't get to tell me what to do."

"Yes, I do." Derek folds his arms over his chest. "I'm your alpha."

"Okay, for starters, you and I have to have a serious talk about why you should tell people what they're getting into before they agree to be part of your pack just to shut you up. Secondly, you're _not_ my alpha. You're not _anyone's_ alpha, because you're _not_ _an alpha_. Remember?"

Now the glower is more fierce than ever, and Stiles thinks it's a good thing that he gets so pissed off at Derek, because otherwise he would probably be hiding under his bed by now. He doesn't know why Derek irritates him so much – oh, wait, yes he does. It's because Derek is a big bag of dicks, and right now he's in Stiles' bedroom, telling him what to do like he's some kind of jealous boyfriend.

"So why don't you just stop following me around, stop trying to keep me from protecting myself so you can be the big bad wolf, pun only partially intended, and I'll stop complaining about the fact that you've adopted me for absolutely no reason and are lurking outside my house at night and usurping my bed."

Now Derek has apparently recovered enough to shoot back, "You didn't seem to mind so much when you were clinging to me the other night."

Something inside Stiles' breaks at that taunt; he grabs the closest object, which happens to be a mug full of tea – what, green tea is soothing, he likes green tea before bed – and chucks it at Derek's face. Under normal circumstances, he's pretty sure that Derek would catch it, but he clearly wasn't expecting it from Stiles, and it smashes right into his jaw and shatters. Derek staggers backwards, just a little, but he's off balance enough for Stiles to grab him by the arm, haul him over to the window, and push him out. Derek lands on his back with a heavy thud.

"And stay the hell out!" Stiles shouts, not even caring if the neighbors hear. He slams the windows shut and draws the curtains. Then he jogs down the stairs to double check that the door is locked, and push a chair underneath the knob. He does that at the back, too. He double checks all the windows and draws all the curtains. Let Derek try to stalk him through that.

It takes him a few minutes to calm down enough to pick up the shattered porcelain and mop up the spilled tea. He's jittery now, but it's from rage, not fear. His phone beeps, and upon checking it's a new text from Derek. He deletes it without opening it, because seriously, fuck that guy. He's about ready to go back to his comic book when the doorbell rings.

Resolving that if Derek is standing at the door, he's calling the police to have him removed, he jogs downstairs and looks through the peephole. But it's not Derek. It's Lydia. She looks a little less put-together than usual, although still as beautiful as ever. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she's wearing a rather sensible blouse, jeans, and sneakers.

Stiles removes the chair from under the knob, unlocks the door, and pulls it open. "Lydia," he says, not even sure where to go from there. "What are you doing here?"

She gives her perfect hair a toss. "I figured you would still be up."

He stands back to let her in, shuts and locks the door, replaces the chair. "Do you, uh, do you want some tea?"

Lydia sniffs a little and says, "What kind?"

"Uh . . . green or black?"

Her eyes narrow. "What kind of green tea?"

He reads the box. "Green tea."

Lydia lets out a sigh. "I suppose."

Stiles busies himself with the kettle when it becomes clear that sticking a mug of water in the microwave is not going to cut it. "What kind of green tea do you want?" he asks. "Because if you coming over to visit is going to become a regular occurrence, I will stock whatever green tea you like."

Lydia sits down on the table, kicking her feet back and forth. "Gunpowder green," she says. "Dragonwell. Jasmine. Genmai cha."

Stiles writes all this down even though he's never heard of them, has no idea how to spell genmai cha, and is pretty sure that none of them are available at the local grocery store. That's okay. There's a Whole Foods only forty-five minutes away. Totally worth it. He makes Lydia her tea, and makes a new mug for himself while he's at it, and they sit in the kitchen in silence for a long minute.

"I'm tired," Lydia says, abruptly. "Let's go to bed."

"Uh, okay?" Stiles says, wondering if his subconscious is rewarding him with a _good_ dream after a week and a half of freaky nightmares. This can't possibly be reality, after all, the words 'let's go to bed' coming from Lydia are never going to be spoken in his house. He's pretty much sure of that. But he follows her up the stairs regardless, and she sits down on the edge of his bed while he shuts down his laptop and double checks to make sure his window is locked. There's no sign of Derek. "I'll just, uh, I'll just go get a sleeping bag," he says. "For me, of course, you can have the bed, you know that, I don't need to tell you that." He realizes he's babbling, and then Lydia pats the bed next to her, and he abruptly sits down.

Finally, she says, "I don't like knowing he's still out there."

"Me neither," Stiles agrees. Since they're being honest here, he says, "I haven't been sleeping well."

"I know," she says. "I haven't either."

She gets up and starts unbuttoning her blouse, and Stiles nearly has a coronary right then and there, because it isn't happening, there is no possible way in any conceivable universe that Lydia Martin is in his bedroom, taking her clothes off, right in front of him. "Uh, uh, what are you doing?" he stammers.

Lydia gives him a look. "I can't shift forms if I'm wearing these clothes."

"Shift . . . forms?" Stiles asks, stupidly.

Lydia gives him a look that indicates exactly how stupid she thinks he is. "Peter bit me. Remember?"

"Well, yeah, but . . ." Stiles realizes that there is no intelligent way to end that sentence, so he shuts up.

Lydia folds her arms over her partially undone blouse and says, "Would it make you feel better if I told you to face the wall?"

"Yes," Stiles says, which is true, his brain and his heart know its true even though his hormones are raging at him for being a chivalrous idiot. Lydia makes an imperious spinning gesture with her fingers, and Stiles whirls to stare at the file cabinet that Scott has always made fun of him for having. "So . . . how's the whole werewolf thing working out for you?" he asks.

"Worse things have happened," she says.

He hears a little whisper of cloth against skin and nearly loses his mind. "And you can do a second-stage shift already, wow. Derek must have taught you."

"No," she says, "I figured it out myself the first day." There's a pause. "You didn't think I was going to go around looking like _that_, did you?"

"Yeah, you've got a point there," Stiles agrees. "And . . . you just happened to come over tonight."

Lydia lets out a sigh. "Derek texted me. He said you had thrown him out, which was absolutely no surprise, and that Scott wasn't answering his phone, probably because it's eleven o'clock at night and some of us like to sleep. So he told me to come over and make sure you were okay, because he knew you would let me in."

"Traitor," Stiles says, although he doesn't really care. "He's such a bossy prick."

"Mm," Lydia says. Her tone is noncommittal. Stiles supposes that after years of dating Jackson, Derek probably seems like a perfectly nice guy. A moment later, he sees a paw on his bed, and turns around. Lydia as a wolf is somewhat neater than Scott as a wolf, and her fur is a lighter brown with a reddish tinge to it. She climbs up onto the bed and promptly takes up more than her fair share. Stiles lies down next to her, feeling awkward but strangely okay, because, well, pack. It strikes him that being part of a pack is always going to be awkward but strangely okay.

"You know," he says, "I've dreamed of having you naked in my bed for, I'm gonna say, years. And now that you're here, you have paws and fur. And you know what? I'm totally okay with that."

Lydia rests her chin on his shoulder. Stiles closes his eyes and goes to sleep.

* * *

In amongst everything else that happened, Stiles forgets to set his alarm clock. So he jolts awake at about seven thirty when his father opens his bedroom door and says, "You're still in bed?"

"Dad!" Stiles sits bolt upright, glad that from the door, Lydia is nothing more than a lump underneath the blankets. "Knock!"

"What?" Stilinski laughs. "It's not like you have a girl in here."

"Yeaaahhh," Stiles says. "That would never happen."

"And thanks for locking me out of my own house, by the way. I practically had to break the door to get in. If you'd had the chair wedged in tight enough, I wouldn't have been able to get in at all."

"Okay, Dad, good talk," Stiles says.

Stilinski raises his hands in surrender and says, "You're late to school. Up and at 'em. If you hurry, you may only miss first period."

"Yeah, yeah," Stiles says. He waits until his father has shut the door to slump backwards onto the pillow, swearing softly to himself. The blankets are shifting a little, and when he turns, he sees Lydia looking at him with human eyes, the covers still drawn up to her chin. It makes him jump. She stretches, languorously, and every working neuron in Stiles' brain short circuits.

"Thank you for an amazing night," Lydia says, with a rather wicked grin.

Stiles, rather intelligently, says, "Uh, buh, you, uh, yeah."

She tosses a pillow over his face. He leaves it there while he listens to the noise of her getting out of bed and getting dressed. He hears the window open, and a soft thump, and only then does he remove the pillow and look around the room to find it empty.

By noon, rumors are running rampant about how Stiles and Lydia were both late to school that morning, and not only that but they were the _same basic amount_ of late. Stiles is kind of grinning a little despite himself, and Lydia is haughtily ignoring the rumors, and even Scott gives Stiles a 'wink wink nudge nudge' sort of look. Stiles rolls his eyes but makes no effort to dispel the rumors, because why the hell would he? He eats lunch in the stairwell with Lydia again. Jackson glares at him and makes subtly threatening comments that, after Peter Hale, are not at all scary, and Stiles finds this hilarious and reminds Jackson no less than four times that _he_ dumped Lydia, so he can back the hell off.

Yes, everything's coming up Stiles, which is why he's so pissed off when he gets to his house and Derek Hale is sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee with his father. He puts down his stuff with a loud thud and says, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Stiles!" his father says, clearly surprised. "Language, for God's sake, I'm sitting right here."

"Dad, that language is mild compared to what I want to use when I come in and find Derek fucking Hale in my kitchen," Stiles says. "What's going on?" He directs this question towards his father, since Derek is just sitting there with his hands folded around his coffee mug, looking innocent.

"Derek wanted to talk to me about how the search for his uncle is going," Stilinski says. "He does sort of deserve to be in the loop. Since I'm not on duty this afternoon, I asked him over to have a cup of coffee, and also to issue an apology for the times we treated him like a fugitive. Which we did because of you and Scott, in case I need to remind you."

"I'll admit that wasn't one of my finer moments, but I have more than paid back that debt, thank you very much," Stiles says. He glares at Derek and says, "Is this your way of making a point? That it doesn't matter if I don't want to see you, because you can just waltz in any time? Are you threatening my father? Because if you are, shit is gonna go _down_, I don't give a fuck whose alpha you think you are – " He's aware that he's saying too much, but he can't stop the torrent of words, he's so furious.

"Stiles," Derek says, and it's that jerk voice he has, that patronizing voice. "You're overreacting."

"I'm overreacting?" Stiles shouts. "I'm not sure it's possible to overreact to this! Die in a fire!"

Derek actually flinches, and Stiles realizes that this may not be the best thing to have said.

"Whoa, okay, I'm sorry," he stammers, "that's not really what I – I mean, it's just a thing that people say, I, I didn't mean to – "

"I do have a passing familiarity with slang, Stiles," Derek says. "I know what you meant."

Stiles deflated, feeling like an asshole. "Sorry," he says again. He sits down at the kitchen table, wondering how the situation got turned around so he was suddenly the bad guy. Also, he's keenly aware that his father is staring at both of them.

"Look," Stilinski says, "obviously I'm a little behind here, but to clear up a few points, Stiles, I asked Derek if he could come to the house. He was waiting for me at the station. So if you're angry that he's here, that's my fault, not his. Secondly, he has as much right to be concerned about Peter's whereabouts as you do. Don't forget, Peter killed Derek's sister. Thirdly, it's possible he can help; he knows his uncle better than any of us, so he might be able to help us figure out his next move. I wanted to pick his brain a bit."

"Sorry," Stiles says again. He has no idea what else he can possibly say.

"It's okay," Stilinski says. "You're a little edgy. And, uh, apparently you two have a history . . .?"

The way he lets it trails off makes it sound like a bad break-up. Stiles wants to bang his head into the table. After a moment, Derek says, in a measured voice, "I said some things that . . . could have been considered insensitive, about his reaction to what my uncle did."

Stiles looks up with narrowed eyes. "That almost sounds like an apology."

Derek just glowers at him.

"You know what," Stiles says, "you two, uh, brainstorm. I've got homework and shit to do, and suddenly I have a burning desire not to be part of this conversation. See you." He grabs his backpack and darts up to his room. Let Derek try to explain what the hell Stiles was talking about. He has no interest in taking part.

He pulls out his laptop and starts doing his homework. Scott texts him to ask if he ever plans on coming to lacrosse practice again. Stiles ignores him. If Scott can't figure out all the different reasons he's not taking part anymore – the latest of which is that if he's going to get beaten up by Jackson for having sex with Lydia, he'd damn well better get the sex first – that isn't his problem. He's been working for almost an hour before he hears the front door open and shut. Ten minutes later, there's a knock on his bedroom door. "Who is it?" he asks.

"It's me," his father says, so he opens the door and lets him in. Stilinski comes in and sits down on the bed. He's quiet for a minute while Stiles goes back to his homework. "So," he finally says. "Werewolves."

Stiles knocks over his can of soda, which fortunately only has a few mouthfuls left in it. "What – you – what?" he stammers.

"Son," Stilinski says, "you know I'm not blind, right? It was pretty obvious that something out of the ordinary was going on. And you saw the pictures from the video store – don't say you didn't, because I know you look through my files – so this doesn't come as a complete surprise to me. And at least I finally have an answer, which is way ahead of where I was."

"So Derek told you," Stiles says.

"Yeah, he told me pretty much everything."

Stiles doubts that, very much, and after considering all the scathing things he wants to say to Derek next time he's unfortunate enough to see him, he decides he had better set the record straight. So he also tells his father everything, which entails owning up to some unfortunate lies. Some of the story does not go over very well. After he's been grounded until the day he dies, which is just fine with him at the moment, Stilinski calms down. "I didn't tell you any of this because I didn't want you involved," Stiles says. "I didn't want you in danger."

"And you thought I was happier in the dark, while _you_ were in danger?" Stilinski asks.

Stiles shrugs. "Phrased like that, it does sound pretty stupid."

"Tell me, son," Stilinski says, "how can someone as smart as you be such an idiot?"

Stiles gives him a hopeful smile. "Genetics?"

This is met with an unamused stare.

"Look, here's the takeaway," Stiles says. "Derek really is invested in finding Peter, for a variety of reasons. And he and Scott are watching out for me, because, I don't know, somehow I'm a member of their pack even though I'm not a werewolf. Don't ask me. I don't get it either."

"Okay," Stilinski says. He considers everything for a few moments. "I do think it's best for you to stay away from the Argents, though."

Stiles nearly hits the roof. "How much did Derek pay you to say that?"

Stilinski gives him a look. "You know me better than that. It's not because they're dangerous, Stiles. You . . . seem to have done a decent job of taking care of yourself, all things considered. It's that they're batshit crazy. I don't know why that gene skipped Allison, but the rest of that family, I'd be happier if they just moved out of my county."

Stiles sighs. "Okay, I see your point, but I want to be able to protect myself. And if that means occasionally consulting with the family that kills werewolves for a living, I think I should be able to do that."

"All right," Stilinski says. "Just . . . be careful."

* * *

After school the next day, Stiles sees Allison walking with an older man, almost completely bald, wearing a leather jacket. She smiles and waves at him, so he figures it's okay to go over and say hi. The Argents have never loved him, but he's human, so they tolerate him. "Hi, Allison," he says, jogging over.

"Hi," she says. "This is my grandfather, Gerard."

"Nice to meet you, sir," Stiles says, because his father has made it very clear that he should respect the elderly.

Gerard has a surprisingly firm grasp. "Nice to meet you too," he says. "Allison's told me all about you."

"I deny everything," Stiles says automatically, and Gerard and Allison both laugh.

"Actually, my son told me about your visit the other day," Gerard says, and Allison raises her eyebrows at him. "So you want to be a hunter, do you?"

"Well, not exactly, sir," Stiles says, as Allison gives him a flabbergasted look. "I just want to be able to protect myself, now that I know that the monsters under the bed are real."

Gerard nods, somewhat gravely. "Well," he says, "originally I came into town for my daughter's funeral, but then I decided to stay on for a little while. It seems that Allison hasn't had much in the way of training beyond her gymnastics and archery, and I thought I might stay and oversee it. Relive my youth, so to speak," he adds, with a smile. "You'd be welcome to join us."

"Oh, uh, thank you," Stiles says, "but I'm not exactly cut out for that kind of thing."

"You think you're weak," Gerard says with a nod. "Or at least that there's no way you can stand up to the monsters. There was a time in my life that I thought that too. But intelligence is more important than strength, and Allison tells me that you're very smart. Knowing your enemy, that's important. Being able to use their strength against them."

The idea does appeal to Stiles, so he says, "Well, I'll give it a try."

Gerard nods. "That's the spirit. Watch out, though – if you're good, we'll recruit you whether you like it or not!"

Stiles laughs, but later it occurs to him that he wasn't sure Gerard meant it as a joke.

Other things are going on, though. Scott's texted him about some guy in an ambulance whose heart was ripped out, and how he won't be able to come over tonight because he's going to be patrolling the forest. Sheriff Stilinski is likewise going to be on patrol, so Stiles is looking at another night either on his own or sleeping with Lydia. He hopes for the latter.

Around midnight, he's still up, doing Scott's history homework and carefully putting in a few spelling errors, and nobody has come over. He gets another text from Scott explaining that the guy was killed by a 'lone wolf', an omega, and that Derek is going to take care of it. Whatever that means. Stiles goes to bed and sleeps restlessly.

His alarm goes off at six AM, and he practically leaps out of bed, he's so tired of tossing and turning. He's up, dressed, and out of the house before his father would normally be home from the night shift. He fiddles around in the library at school, since it's pointless to go to class so early, and decides to zip a text over to his dad. 'Any luck with the ambulance thing?' he asks, and then starts flipping through a book about the Civil War, because Scott has a test about it coming up, and he intends to beat him over the head with the subject material until he gets at least a C.

He doesn't get a response from his father, but that's not all that unusual, when he's working. Stiles isn't in the mood to be ignored, though, so he sends another text saying, 'The suspense is killing me here, Dad.' Then the bell for first period rings, and he gets up and gathers his stuff. He still hasn't gotten a response by the time first period starts, and it's chemistry, which is great, just what he needs today. Harris is being his usual dickish self, and Stiles isn't even paying attention because his father isn't texting him back.

He knows that he's just being stupid and panicky, that his father's just working and busy, that he should put his phone away, but he can't make himself do it. Finally, after ten minutes of being fidgety, he sends another text that says, 'Are you okay?'

No response.

'Seriously, just text me to let me know you're alive, k?'

No response.

"Mr. Stilinski!" Harris calls out. "Your phone, please. We've had discussions about this."

Stiles shoots to his feet, so startled that he knocks over his chair. He sees both Scott and Allison staring at him. Hell, the whole class is staring at him. His mouth opens and closes for a moment, and then he blurts out, "I gotta go," and dashes from the room. Harris snaps something after him, something about detention, far away and unimportant.

Scott catches up with him on the front steps. "What's going on?"

"My dad isn't texting me back," Stiles says. "Something's wrong, and don't, don't tell me that I'm just being a worrier, I know that something's wrong and I – "

"Then why are we still standing here?" Scott asks.

"Right," Stiles says, and dashes for his Jeep. He wants to say something about how Scott should be in class, about how his grades are bad enough and Harris hates him enough already. But he's intensely grateful for Scott's presence, and after all the times he skipped class to help Scott with werewolf stuff, it only seems fair. He makes a mental note to send Danny more pictures and just have him change all of Scott's grades, because what the hell, really.

Scott drives, because he was out with Derek the night before and knows where the ambulance was. While they're driving, Stiles calls his father's office, and the secretary tells him that he's still out in the field. She tries to raise him with the radio, but gets no response. "We should call Derek," Scott says. Stiles is pissed at Derek, but he knows that Scott's right, so he takes Scott's phone since his doesn't have Derek's number in it, and dials.

It rings and rings and nobody picks up, and then there's a voice mail, one of those generic 'you have reached such-and-such number' voice mails. Stiles leaves a message in a voice that's shaking. "Derek, my dad – my dad is missing, nobody's seen him since he was out last night, looking around where the omega was, we – we need you to help us find him." He chokes it out. "Please." Then he hangs up.

Scott parks off the road as close as he can get without drawing police attention, and they get out. Stiles is practically twitching with nervous energy now, barely able to swallow. Scott takes a long breath of the fresh air, and then sets off purposefully. Stiles follows. Neither of them say anything. Scott moves at a quick jog, and Stiles keeps up with him, because what he lacks in strength he makes up for in endurance, and adrenaline is a powerful chemical.

"This is where we saw the omega," Scott says, about twenty minutes later. "He took off running. Derek went after him. He told me that he could handle it, and I should get home, so I did. Because, you know, it's easier not to try to argue with him when he's in that sort of mood."

Stiles nods a little. "Well, Dad was looking for him, too, even if he didn't know exactly who or what he was looking for. So . . ."

"So we'll track him," Scott says, and they take off jogging again. Their path curves back until they're running parallel to the road, only about fifty feet into the forest. Scott stops, abruptly, so abruptly that Stiles nearly runs into him.

"What, what is it?" Stiles asks.

"I smell blood," Scott says, and now he takes off at a dead run. Stiles nearly trips over himself following, and Scott runs right back towards the road.

They find Sheriff Stilinski about twenty feet from the road, lying in a pile of brush. His body was obviously thrown there by some sort of impact, presumably from a car or truck. Stiles goes to his knees in the damp leaves, hyperventilating. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Dad. Dad. Can you hear me?" He reaches out with shaking hands to check a pulse. He can barely do it. But it's there, a little erratic, but there, and his father groans when he touches him. His skin is cool and damp, but not cold.

Scott is already on the phone with 911, so Stiles can devote his attention to his father, though it's difficult to be objective. He's breathing, heart is beating, but there's blood on the side of his face, the side that's pressed into the ground. Stiles tries to move it, and his father groans again, so he decides not to. He doesn't see any other obvious injuries except that one of his legs is twisted at a somewhat strange angle.

Then there are sirens wailing, and Scott has to physically pull Stiles away before he'll let the paramedics in. "Is, is he going to be okay?" Stiles is stammering, as they're making ominous noises about hypothermia and frostbite – how familiar – blood loss and head trauma. "What happened, is he going to be okay?" Stiles realizes that he's shouting, and that Scott's arm over his shoulders and chest has become firm and restraining with unnatural strength.

"Looks like a hit-and-run, son," the deputy says, and Stiles can't believe it, can't believe that in a world of werewolves and hunters, he has to worry about something so mundane.

"No," Scott says quietly, as the deputy goes to talk to the paramedics, who are getting Stilinski loaded into the ambulance. Stiles can barely look at him. "Look at the tracks," Scott says. "The way he fell. Facedown. His tracks are far apart. Heavy footfalls. The ground was wet, so he made deep impressions."

Stiles can only barely say it. "He was running from something."

"Not something . . . someone." Scott points, and Stiles sees it, through vision that's red with rage: the place where the tire tracks of some vehicle left the road and drove onto the dirt.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

They don't talk much on the drive to the hospital. Scott insists on driving, because no matter how much Stiles doesn't want to admit it, he's in no shape to be behind the wheel of a car. So he sits in the passenger seat as they drive along behind the ambulance, which is going at least fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. Stiles doesn't think that's a very good sign.

He doesn't want to talk to Derek, but at the same time he's not so pissed off to make him wander around the forest looking for them, so he sends him a text. It probably has nineteen different typos in it, but he manages to convey that his father has been found and they're on their way to the hospital. He sends a similar text to Allison, who has sent an inquiry as to Scott's whereabouts, and to Lydia, because Scott tells him to. He doesn't ask for further clarification, figuring that the answer is 'because pack, that's why'.

They screech up to the hospital, putting unfair pressure on his tires, and Scott finds a parking space that's not too far away. By the time they get to the ER door, his father has already been wheeled inside and is nowhere to be seen. Before Stiles can start terrorizing ER staff with his demands, a voice calls out, "Scott! Why aren't you at school?"

Hell hath no fury like a mother on the warpath, but when Scott says, "Stiles' dad is here, he was hit by a car," Melissa immediately melts into concern. She hurries off to check on him for them.

Stiles can't even think about sitting down, so he paces back and forth until she comes back a minute later to tell them that Sheriff Stilinski is going into surgery, and that his condition is serious but not critical, whatever that means. Stiles nods like he's even capable of understanding human speech at the moment. Melissa says she'll call the school to let the principal know where they are, and that she'll update them as soon as she can.

Scott tries to steer Stiles into a chair, and when it becomes obvious that won't work, he steers him into a quiet room instead. Scott knows the hospital pretty well, since his mother works there, and there's a little lounge for families to wait in during routine surgeries or treatments. It's empty at the moment, which is fortunate. Scott doesn't try to talk to him, or calm him down, or tell him that his dad is going to be okay. He just stays there while Stiles paces around like a caged lion.

Almost an hour has passed, and Stiles is still restless, when Derek shows up. He doesn't even say anything, he just gives a nod of grudging respect to Scott, then stands in the corner and folds his arms over his chest. It takes Stiles almost a whole minute to notice his presence, and then he just stares at him for a minute before snapping, "What the hell are you doing here?"

Derek almost looks confused. "You texted me – "

"I texted you so you wouldn't be trying to find us in the forest. That was it. End of intended message. Now get the hell out."

"Look, whatever your problem is – "

"You want to know what my _problem _is?" Stiles shouts. He grabs Derek by the front of his jacket and shoves him up against the wall. He's so angry that he even manages it. "This is all your fucking fault, you bastard! I didn't want him involved in any of this, but _you_ had to go and tell him all about the crazy shit that's going on, and now he's in the God damned hospital! That's what my fucking problem is!"

"Stiles," Scott tries to interject, trying to pull him off without hurting him, "we don't even know that it had anything to do with this."

"That's not the point!" Stiles pulls Derek forward and then slams him into the wall again. A distant, rational part of his brain registers surprise that Derek hasn't clawed his throat out for doing this, but is allowing Stiles to manhandle him. "I may not know what happened but I know my dad, okay? And he _never_ would have been wandering around out there alone if he hadn't thought something weird was going on. He would have had, had his deputies or his dogs or someone, _anyone_ would have been with him. And then even if he had still been hurt, he wouldn't have laid in the God damned road bleeding and alone for hours!"

"I'm sorry," Derek says, quietly, and it takes a few seconds for it to click for Stiles that he actually said that. "I thought it would make things easier for you if he knew. You wouldn't have to lie to him anymore."

Stiles lets him go and turns away, swears shakily, and slumps into a chair.

"I know what it's like to lose family," Derek says. "I never meant to put him in danger."

Stiles believes him. It makes him feel like a piece of shit. He doesn't want to deal with this, with any of this, so he just sits in the chair and stares at the wall. A long minute goes by before Scott says to Derek, "So . . . what do we know?"

Derek sits down a few chairs away from Stiles. "I followed the omega last night, but it wasn't him. He was killed by some hunters."

"What, like . . . did he attack them?" Scott asked skeptically.

Derek shakes his head. "No. They caught him in a trap, and they cut him in half. For no reason other than that he's a werewolf."

Scott sucks in a surprised breath at this, then lets it out. "So it definitely wasn't the omega. Did you see Sheriff Stilinski at all?"

"No. After the Argents killed the omega, I took off. I didn't see him anywhere near there, or smell him, either, although there wasn't a lot of wind."

There's a long pause before Scott asks, "What about Peter?"

Derek answers in a slow, measured voice. "It's possible that the presence of the omega would have drawn him to the area. He could still be looking to add to his pack. I haven't seen him, but that doesn't mean he's not out there. If Sheriff Stilinski happened upon him while he was looking for whoever attacked the ambulance . . ."

Scott hunches his shoulders and says, "Then he would want to make sure he didn't tell anybody. But why a car? Did Peter even have a car?"

"After the fight at the house, I tracked Peter through the forest," Derek says. "But after a while, his tracks just ended. And then there were tire tracks instead. I assume he had a car waiting for him."

"Why not the nurse's car?" Scott asks. "That's how he got there."

"It might have been too far away. Remember, it wasn't parked very close to the Hale house, or it would have been found a lot sooner. And Peter always had a plan B. That's just the way he was, even when I was young. I don't know why he had a second car. All I know is that, after the fight, Peter got in a car about a mile and a half away from the house."

Now Scott begins to pace. "Why the hell didn't you tell us this before?"

"Because you didn't need to know," Derek says. "I told the people who were looking for him."

"So . . . you told Stiles' dad," Scott assumes. Derek nods, and Scott swears. "So if Sheriff Stilinski saw him, but, but maybe from a distance – he turns and runs. Peter doesn't want to chase and catch him on foot because he doesn't want it to look like an animal attack, because then we'll know his approximate location. So he gets in his car and chases him down that way. Sheriff Stilinski runs back towards the road, probably trying to get to his own car . . ."

Derek is nodding. "That seems to be the most likely explanation to me."

Melissa McCall pokes her head into the lounge before Scott can say anything else. "Stiles?" she asks, and his head jerks up. "Your father is still in surgery, but I thought I would come give you an update on his injuries, okay?" She drags a chair over and sits down across from him, then beckons for Scott to sit down next to her, which he does. "So the car hit him about here," she says, holding her hand level with Scott's chest. "And he was actually very lucky with how it hit him. She turns Scott a little and puts her hand on his back, just over the left shoulder blade. "See, the height of the vehicle means that most of his important organs were okay," she says, making a circular gesture over Scott's abdomen. "And the angle that it struck him kept his spine intact. So his shoulder blade is broken. Some of his ribs are broken as well, and his left lung was punctured." She sees Stiles pale and says, "His right lung was okay, though, so that's how he survived as long as he did. All that, they're getting fixed up now. They don't foresee a lot of complications. What they're worried about is head trauma. Not from where the car hit him, but from where he hit the ground. There was a lot of swelling."

"A subdural hematoma," Stiles says. He had written a paper on brain injuries once, for a college sophomore taking a biology class.

"Well, yes," Melissa says. "But so far, despite the seriousness of his injuries, he's holding up remarkably well." She squeezes both of Stiles' hands in her own and says, "It's lucky that you found him when you did."

Stiles nods and says, "Thanks. Or . . . or something."

"I'll be back as soon as he's out of surgery, okay?" Melissa says, and leaves without another word.

After a long pause, Stiles says, "He wasn't there that long."

"What?" Scott asks.

"My dad. It's not like he was lying there all night." Stiles looks up. He's in control now. The effort is costly, but he keeps his voice steady. "Those injuries are way too serious, especially the head injury. If he had been hit by the car at, say, midnight, he would have been dead before we got there. He can't have been there for more than an hour. He wasn't cold when we got there either. Just cool. And it was cold last night."

"So it happened early this morning," Derek says, nodding along.

"What was he doing out so long?" Scott asks, frowning. "Derek, did you tell him that the omega had been killed? That he didn't have to look for the guy who attacked the ambulance?"

Derek nods, then clarifies, "Well, I texted him. We exchanged numbers when I met him at Stiles' house. I let him know that a lone wolf had attacked the ambulance, that he claimed the occupant was already dead – although he could have just been saying that to try to hold the Argents off – and that the hunters had killed him. I don't know if he got the text, though. He didn't respond."

"He doesn't always check his texts if he's working," Stiles says. "Anyone with official police business will call him on the radio. He has a special ringtone if it's me, and anything else he'll just ignore."

"Well, his phone would tell us whether or not he had looked at the text," Scott says, and stands up. "I'll go see if it's with the rest of his stuff. Mom will get it for me."

He jogs out of the room. Derek and Stiles sit in awkward silence for a minute.

"Look, I'm sorry," Stiles says.

"Don't worry about it," Derek says.

"No, I've been crappy to you and for once you haven't really deserved it," Stiles says. "I mean, you were a shit at my house the other night, but you wouldn't have been such a jerk if I hadn't been rubbing it in your face that you aren't an alpha yet."

"Stiles," Derek says, a little more forcefully, "forget about it."

"I mean, you're probably just as upset as I am about Peter still being missing, given everything that he did, so I should – "

Derek takes a hold of his chin, pulling it up so Stiles has to look at him. "Shut up, Stiles," he says.

Stiles shuts up.

Scott comes back in a minute later. "No phone," he says. Stiles blinks at him. "I know, weird. The rest of his stuff was all there – even his gun. Just not his phone."

"That's really weird," Stiles says, mostly because he can't think of anything else to say.

"Maybe he saw something and took a picture," Scott suggests.

"Well, either way, if it happened this morning, Peter or whoever did it might still be in the same area." Derek stands up and says, "I'll go see what I can find."

"Derek – " Stiles has to swallow hard as the older man gives him a look over his shoulder. "Be careful."

Derek nods, and then he's gone.

The waiting drags on interminably. Stiles is too tired to pace, but he's had too much Adderall to sit and do nothing, so after the first half hour, he turns to Scott and says, "Did you bring your backpack?"

"What? Yeah, it's out in the car."

"Good. Go get it." Stiles gives Scott a look that would send any sensible werewolf running. "You're going to study."

"I'm . . . going to what?" Scott asks.

"You're going to sit there and do your homework. All the homework you haven't done because you've been too busy being a werewolf and dating Allison. You're going to do it. I will help you, but so help me God, you are going to pass high school because I am not going to college without you."

"Oh . . . okay," Scott says. He gets up and leaves the room. Stiles hadn't bothered to grab his bag, which is presumably still sitting in the chemistry classroom, unless Harris threw it out the window. But Scott has enough schoolwork for both of them. He comes back and sits down with a groan, looking through the pages of history worksheets that he hasn't bothered to turn in. He looks at Stiles. "Really?"

"Really," Stiles confirms.

Scott hangs his head and gets to work.

Melissa comes in and out, as each of the surgeries is finished, to give them updates. Stiles taps one of Scott's pencils against the arm of his chair, answers Scott's questions about the Civil War, and writes down lists of his own questions. What was his father doing in the woods all night? Where did he go? What was on his phone, and who took it? Can they still find the phone even if it's turned off? Could he guess his father's username and password? (The password will be his mother's name or some variation on it, Stiles is certain, but he isn't quite so sure about the username.)

Around noon, an orderly brings them sandwiches. By then Scott has moved onto his algebra, and Stiles is actively tutoring him because math was never one of Scott's best subjects, even before the whole werewolf thing. Scott eats his own sandwich and then eats Stiles', too, when Stiles says he's had too much Adderall to be hungry.

Allison and Lydia show up at two thirty, which means they came straight from school. They take one look at Scott's hangdog expression and drifts of papers, and sit down quietly with their own homework. Allison has brought Stiles the day's worth of makeup work, but he pushes it aside in favor of haranguing Scott. His own grades can take the hit, and focusing on Scott is easier than focusing on For Whom the Bell Tolls. Also, it takes twice as much effort to get Scott to do his schoolwork while Allison is in the vicinity.

Finally, almost eight hours after they arrived at the hospital, Melissa comes in to tell them that his father is out of surgery and is in serious but stable condition. Stiles shoots to his feet. "Can I see him?"

"They're getting him settled in the ICU," Melissa says. "It should be another half hour or so." She looks at Scott's pile of schoolwork. Her lips twitch, but she tactfully doesn't say anything about. "I'll come get you as soon as you can go."

"We should go," Allison said, closing her chemistry textbook. "They won't let us into the ICU anyway; it's family only."

"No," Stiles says, before he can even think about it. He looks at Melissa and says, "Can they stay? Is it okay?"

"I'll talk to the nurses up there," Melissa says. She squeezes his shoulder and leaves the room.

"Finished!" Scott puts his pencil down with a flourish.

"Great," Stiles says. "Now you only have a ten page makeup paper on Beneath the Wheel to write."

"I didn't read it," Scott confesses.

Stiles lets out a snort. "None of us read it," he says. "Download the Spark Notes. Chop chop."

"I read it," Lydia says.

"Of course you did, you probably read it when you were seven years old."

She lets out a sniff. "Nine."

Allison laughs. "I hope you didn't understand it."

"What can I say?" Lydia gives an elegant shrug. "I am wise beyond my years."

Allison and Lydia begin to debate the relative merits of different books they've read. Lydia is more of a fan of the classics, and Allison likes, well, trashier stuff, and isn't ashamed of it. Then the subject winds up on Twilight and how the werewolves in that are different from real werewolves, and then Scott buries his face in a pillow and tries to suffocate himself because he just had to use the words 'real werewolves'.

Finally, after what seems like a geological epoch, Melissa comes back to take them up to Sheriff Stilinski's room. They gather their things and follow her down a hallway, around a corner, down another hallway, and finally up one floor in the elevator. The woman at the desk of the ICU checks them in, and Stilinski's room is the second door on the right.

The others hang back slightly as Stiles goes in. His father looks pale, smaller than usual somehow, tucked away in the hospital bed. There are wires and tubes and a partial mask over his face, securing the tracheal intubation. Stiles' breath catches a little at the sight, but he walks the rest of the way in anyway. There's another bed in the room, but it's empty, and a small window that looks out on the parking lot.

Stiles walks over to his father's bed and reaches out, putting his fingers on his father's wrist to hear the reassuring beat of his pulse, watching it on the monitor. Then he sits down in the chair next to the bed and waves the others in. They enter slowly, cautiously. The entire room is hushed. It seems to swallow sound somehow.

It takes Stiles a long moment, but when he speaks again, his voice is still even. "When is he going to wake up?"

"We don't know, Stiles," Melissa says. "Right now he's still under general anesthesia. That won't wear off until sometime tonight. After that, it'll depend on the extent of the head injury, and we won't know that until he wakes up."

Or doesn't, Stiles thinks, but he doesn't dare say that aloud. He just nods and thanks her.

The silence sits long enough to become awkward. It's clear to Stiles that he's going to have to give some indication that it's okay for the conversation to begin again, so he says, "Why don't they ever have us read anything good in English class, like Tolkien?"

"We read The Hobbit in seventh grade," Allison says, and this gets them into a conversation about the books they've read that would make good lectures in English class. Stiles lets them run with it, sinking back into his own silence, watching his father's chest rise and fall with each measured breath. At some point Derek slinks back in; Scott wants to know how he got into the ICU, but Stiles doesn't really care. He had already figured that Derek would manage to get into the ICU. That's part of what makes him Derek. He doesn't say much, but they gather that he wasn't able to find anything: no tracks, no phone, and no Peter.

Conversation lapses in and out while they play on their phones or chat or, in Derek's case, glower at absolutely nothing. Around six, Scott's stomach lets out a growl. He walks over and nudges Stiles on the shoulder. "C'mon, man, let's go get something to eat."

Stiles shakes his head and says, "I'm not really hungry."

"You haven't eaten anything all day," Scott reminds him.

Stiles just shakes his head again.

"How about this," Allison says, trying to keep her voice cheerful. "We'll go down to the cafeteria and bring some food back, and that way you can have some dinner but you won't have to leave?"

After a minute, Stiles makes himself look up at her and forces a little smile. "Okay, yeah," he says. "That sounds like a good idea."

The three of them get up and leave, while Lydia bitches about how the hospital probably doesn't have anything organic, and Allison tells her that one hamburger won't ruin her figure. "You don't know that," Lydia says, and then the door to the ICU closes behind them and Stiles can't hear them anymore. He's relieved to be alone, so he can finally let out the breath that it feels like he's been holding all day. He can't afford to break down in front of the others, when they already think he's so fragile.

Now he can finally let some of it out, and his chest hurts, it's an actual, physical pain of having held himself together all day. His fists clench down in the sheets of his father's hospital bed, and he lets out a strangled little moan. The rock-solid lump in his throat finally dissolves into a flood of unmanly sobs, and he's desperately glad that nobody is there to witness it.

Or at least, that's what he's thinking until a pair of arms encircles him from behind, and he realizes that he had forgotten all about Derek. Derek, who has been lurking in the corner, not saying a word, for the past two hours. He practically blends in with the shadows. But he's there, and now he's sitting behind Stiles, with one arm around his waist and one across his chest, his own chest pressed into Stiles' back. Stiles has no idea what to do with this, with the fact that Derek Hale is actually hugging him, but then he remembers Derek saying that he knows what it's like to lose family, and suddenly he doesn't care that he's not alone. Because if Derek understands anything, it's this.

And Derek doesn't say anything, doesn't try to tell him things will be okay, doesn't try to cheer him up or offer him a tissue or anything. He just holds him, his chin resting on Stiles' shoulder, so Stiles can feel Derek's breath against his ear.

They sit like that for several long minutes. Then, just as abruptly, Derek pulls away and returns to his corner. Stiles isn't sure why, but then he remembers werewolf-super-hearing. He hastily blows his nose and wipes his eyes with the corner of his sleeve, and by the time he's done that, he can hear the footsteps as the others come back into the room.

Scott puts down a foil-wrapped burger and a little thing of curly fries on the bedside table for Stiles. With a somewhat awkward smile, he says, "I figure if anything will wake him up, it will definitely be the smell of curly fries."

Stiles tries to laugh. It doesn't really work, but nobody points that out. The others sit down with their food. Lydia has a salad with grilled chicken, and a bottle of water. Allison and Scott both have cheeseburgers, and Stiles presumes that's what they brought for him. That's confirmed a moment later when Scott gets up and unwraps the sandwich for him, and says, "C'mon, I know you're hungry."

"I'm really not," Stiles says.

"You should eat anyway," Scott replies.

"Maybe later," Stiles says.

Derek stands up. He walks over and picks up the cheeseburger. Then he holds it in front of Stiles' face and says, "Eat the cheeseburger, or I will cram it down your throat."

Stiles blinks at him. Then he snatches the sandwich out of Derek's hands. He takes a gigantic bite and says, with his mouth full, "You're such a prick."

Once Stiles' stomach wakes up, he finds that he's ravenous, and actually can't remember the last time he's eaten. While he's inhaling his cheeseburger and fries, Scott goes to get him two more. When they've all finished eating, the girls leave for home. Stiles badgers Scott through the Spark Notes and coming up with a thesis for his paper.

Melissa comes in around eight and says her shift is over. "C'mon, boys, I'll take you home."

Stiles gives her a 'you've got to be kidding me' look and says, "I'm just gonna stay here tonight."

"Stiles," Melissa says patiently, "you ought to get some rest."

"I will," Stiles says. "I'll rest, I promise. Just . . . at least just for tonight, I'm staying here. But Scott, you should go home. Work on your paper."

"Are you sure?" Scott's forehead wrinkles. "I don't want you to, you know, be alone," he adds awkwardly, sneaking a sideways look at his mother, hoping that she's not paying attention to them having a moment.

"I'm not alone, I've still got Tall, Dark, and Broody," Stiles says, thumbing over at Derek. Scott's frown deepens, and Stiles just looks at him, a pleading sort of look, hoping he'll understand why he wants Derek for company now, and not anyone else. Because Derek won't try to tell him everything's going to be fine; Derek won't pander to him or lie to him.

"Well, if you're sure," Scott finally says.

"Yep. I expect to see an outline tomorrow. E-mail it to me."

"Okay, mom," Scott says.

Melissa lets out a disbelieving snort. "If only I had as much success getting you to do your schoolwork as Stiles does," she says, and then shepherds him out of the room.

Everything's quiet for a long time. Stiles stares at the clock, stares at the monitors, stares at the wall. Finally, he turns to Derek and says, "So, do you have a job?"

This takes Derek off guard. He blinks and says, "What?"

"A job. You know. Like, do wear a little paper hat and serve fries, do you bag groceries, do you write romance novels, what? Because I don't know many people who have as much free time as you do. Actually, I don't know _any_ people who have as much free time as you do."

Derek blinks again. For a minute, Stiles thinks he won't answer. Then he says, "No. I don't have a job." Stiles just looks at him, clearly inviting further explanation. Derek shifts and says, "In case you couldn't tell from the size of the house, my family had a lot of money. They also had a life insurance policy. The money was split between me and Laura. It was in a trust that paid for our education, and then we were given what was left at the end."

"Must've been a lot," Stiles says. "I've seen the car you drive." He taps his fingers against the arm of his chair. "So you don't actually live in the Hale house, right?"

"No. I have an apartment." Derek takes a look at Stiles' skeptical stare. "Why is that so hard to believe?"

"Gee, let me think, because every time we show up at the house, you just happen to be there?" Stiles suggests. "So either you live there, you're stalking us, or you can teleport. And I would have accepted any of these as viable answers, by the way."

Derek gives him a look, then sighs. "I have a camera set up at the turn off from the main road. Once you turn off, there really isn't anywhere to go _except_ the house, so when someone takes the turn off, my phone alerts me so I can make it back to the house before they get there."

"Man, you werewolves and your technology," Stiles grumbles. "Hidden cameras. Macs. My-fi. Totally taking the mystique out of things, just like I told Peter."

"Sorry that we couldn't live up to your eighteenth century stereotype," Derek tells him.

Stiles pouts.

"You're not cute," Derek tells him. "In any case, nobody's going to be living in the house now, since the Argents have basically taken it over as their base of operations."

"They've what?" Stiles asks, snapping a little more than he means to. When Derek just blinks at him, he says, "Sorry, I just . . . man. That's low. Why don't they just give you a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice in it," he adds, doing his best Billy Crystal, which isn't very good. Predictably, Derek misses the reference anyway. "Why don't you tell them to get the hell off your property?"

Derek shrugs. "In order to tell them that, I'd have to actually go near them. And I really don't have any interest in doing that."

"Fair. Totally fair." Stiles pulls his knees up to his chest and sits that way for a minute. After a while, he says, "Hey . . . if someone is hurt, and you turn them into a werewolf, do the injuries they already have heal?"

Derek gives him a sharp, piercing look. Then he nods slowly. "Yes, they do. But Peter wasn't lying when he said that the bite could kill you. The body has to be able to withstand it. Somebody who's already wounded is at a higher risk." He meets Stiles' gaze and says, "If you want me to give him the bite, I will. But I suggest that you weigh the option carefully."

Stiles watches his father's chest rise and fall for almost a full minute. Then he shakes his head. "No. He . . . he's really tough. I think he'll be okay. I didn't make him watch his cholesterol for years only for him to get killed like this," he adds. Then he yawns, which surprises him a little.

Derek gives him another look. "Did you sleep last night?"

"What?" Stiles asks.

"Last night. I know that none of the pack were staying with you. Did you sleep?"

"Not really," Stiles admits.

"Then sleep now," Derek says.

Stiles looks at Derek for a long minute, then gives a snappy salute and says, "Sir, yes sir!"

Derek rolls his eyes, but apparently thinks that smart-ass obedience is better than a lack of obedience, so he doesn't protest. Stiles leans forward in the chair, resting his arms on his father's bed and his head on his arms, and he's asleep a few minutes later.

He wakes up off and on throughout the night, occasionally shifting position, because sleeping in a chair isn't really comfortable. Doctors and nurses are in and out fairly frequently, and he still isn't sleeping well as a whole (and to be fair, he's not sure if all his Adderall has worn off yet). But eventually, he falls into a deeper sleep.

He comes out of it somewhat confused, not sure what woke him up and not entirely remembering where he is. There's a hand on his back, rubbing slow, comforting circles, and at first he assumes that it's his father, but then memory starts to trickle back in, and he knows it isn't. Then he hears Derek talking, his voice closer now, right beside him. He's not sure who Derek is talking to. Maybe he's just talking to himself. He's alone so much that somehow Stiles wouldn't be surprised to find out that he did.

"You know, it's ironic . . ." Derek says to nobody. "I used to sit in the hospital like this with Peter. After the fire. Laura and I would take turns." His hand never stops that soothing motion, and now Stiles believes that Derek was telling the truth about wolves being tactile creatures. Derek can only be doing this for his own benefit, since Stiles is 'asleep'; he's equally sure that if Derek knew he was awake, he would stop. Hugging him when he's having hysterics is one thing. This is different, more intimate somehow. It's family; it's pack.

"He was the only family we had left back then. I never would have imagined what he would become . . . but I can't really hate him for it. I should, probably, but I can't. I just wish I could fix it. Wish I could take it all back."

Derek is quiet for a long time. Stiles almost dozes off again.

"Your son, you know . . ." Derek says, so Stiles supposes that he's talking to his unconscious father, not a nurse who wandered in. "He is one tough son of a bitch. He would deny it if anyone said it to his face, but . . . I guess to a certain degree, he reminds me of myself. Maybe that's why we butt heads all the time. Because we're so much alike. But I like that about him. Because even when he was afraid of me, he was never intimidated by me. He never took my shit. So even when I'm about ready to kill him . . . I'm still glad he's there.

"After I found out Laura had been killed, I never really thought I would have a pack again. Being omega is dangerous, but . . . I didn't want a new pack. Nobody could replace my family, and I didn't want anyone to try. But this is okay. I wouldn't have thought it would be, but it's okay. And it's nice to have somebody that I can consider an equal." Derek lets out a low chuckle, felt more than seen. "I bet he would be surprised to hear that . . . that it's not Scott, not Peter, but Stiles Stilinski that I would consider my equal. And that that's okay, too."

Derek doesn't say anything else. After a while, the motion of Derek's hand on his back, solid and reassuring, lulls Stiles back to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

_To those who've asked, yes, this will stay gen. It's not my fault that Derek and Stiles are so touchy-feely with each other. I just like my boys touchy-feely! Or something like that. Also Derek has no modesty._

Chapter Seven

The next morning, nothing about Sheriff Stilinski has changed. He's still in the exact same position. The doctor comes in and checks him over, does some tests, makes some notes. "Is he in a coma?" Stiles asks. The doctor sits down and explains how 'coma' is a very broad term (which Stiles takes as a yes) and that his father is still reacting to outside stimuli in ways that suggest he will regain consciousness.

Not long after that, his deputy, Carmichael, comes in. He brings some flowers that people at the station went in together to buy, and talks with the doctor. "Any luck finding the driver?" Stiles asks.

"Well, we got some paint flecks off your father's jacket," Carmichael says, "so we know the car was black, and from the position of his injuries, it was either a truck or an SUV. We're checking in around repair shops in the area."

"Did you see that the tire tracks went off the road?" Stiles asks.

Carmichael gives him a 'well duh' look and says, "The sheriff wouldn't have been jogging down the center of the road. Whoever was driving was probably drunk, or maybe fell asleep at the wheel."

"No, but, what if they ran him down on purpose?" Stiles protests.

"Can . . . you think of any reason someone might have done that?" Carmichael asks, obviously skeptical.

"I don't know, there was some crazed guy who attacks ambulances running around, you tell me."

Carmichael lets out a sigh. He sits down next to Stiles and gives him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Look," he says, and there's a note of patronization in his voice that Stiles really doesn't like. Apparently Derek doesn't like it either; there's a barely audible growl from the corner of the room he's lurking in. "I know you're still shaken up about what happened to you, buddy. But there's no evidence that someone maliciously ran your dad down last night. It was an accident. They freaked out and took off. We'll see if we can find the car, and the driver. There are protocols in place for this sort of thing. Okay?"

Stiles thinks about asking about the phone, but decides it's a better idea to get Carmichael out of the room before Derek tears his arm off. "Okay," he says. "Sorry."

Carmichael gives him another pat on the shoulder, then stands and leaves the room.

Stiles raises his eyebrows at Derek. "What was that about?" he asks.

Derek just glowers at him.

"Okay," Stiles says. "Pack. No touching. I got it." He fidgets. "Carmichael's not a bad guy, you know, he's just a little . . . oblivious, sometimes."

Derek folds his arms over his chest and mutters, "He had no right to talk to you like that."

"Hah! Try telling him that. He's like fifty years old." Stiles hunches up a little more in his chair. "You keep that up, and I'm gonna think you like me or something."

At that comment, Derek rises to his feet. "I have things I need to do," he says.

"Sure, have fun," Stiles says. "If you're capable."

Derek just skulks out of the room without another word. Stiles can't help but be amused at his behavior, despite the way everything else is going. He looks over at his father, and immediately chokes up. He doesn't even look like his dad anymore, between the equipment and the pallid color of his skin, the way his wrinkles are more pronounced without his smile or worried frown to hold them in place.

Melissa comes in around seven, not dressed in her scrubs as it's her day off. "Stiles, I'm going to take you to school," she says.

"But – " Stiles immediately begins.

"No buts," Melissa says, but her tone is gentle. She sits down beside him. "Stiles, honey, your father is a single dad. Which means that while he's in the hospital, you don't really have a legal guardian. Now, given the givens, I think everyone's willing to overlook that at least for a little while, since you're sixteen, not six, and I'll help make sure you're taken care of. But if you start doing stuff like skipping school, people will notice. So for your own sake, you need to do this."

Stiles heaves a sigh. "Fine," he says. "But if Harris makes any sort of obnoxious comment, I might break his face." Melissa, who's still smarting at Harris' comments about Scott's lack of father figures, finds this amusing. "My car's still in the parking lot," he adds.

"No way are you driving right now," Melissa says. "You can't have gotten more than a few hours of sleep."

"If I'm not safe to drive, I'm definitely not safe for school," Stiles says, but Melissa ushers him out to her car anyway. Scott is in the front passenger seat, obviously half asleep, which is fairly normal for Scott in the morning hours. Melissa drives them to school and promises to call or text Stiles if his father's condition changes.

Life descends into what feels like a bizarre parody of normal. He turns in his homework, pays attention to lectures, eats lunch in the cafeteria, all the while unable to believe that this is actually happening. Scott has lacrosse practice after school, so Stiles asks Allison if she'll drive him to the hospital. "If you promise to get some sleep tonight so Mrs. McCall will give you your keys back, sure," Allison says. But when they leave the building, Gerard is leaning against her car. "Oh, crap," Allison says. "I forgot that we were starting the training today. He was going to take me out to practice my archery."

Gerard greets them both with a smile, and Allison says, "Gerard, do you mind if we make a quick stop at the hospital? I told Stiles I would drop him off."

"Of course," Gerard said. He looks at Stiles and says, "Everything okay?"

Stiles has been fending off questions all day, and he really doesn't want to answer any more, but says, "My father was in an accident."

"Stiles is the sheriff's son," Allison adds.

"Oh, I heard about that," Gerard says, nodding. "A hit-and-run, wasn't it? It's terrible the way some people don't accept responsibility for their actions."

"Yeah," Stiles says, and then doesn't say anything else, hoping that the old man will get the point and stop talking about it.

"Well, I hope you can still come train with us," Gerard says, as they get in the car.

"Yeah, I, I'll try," Stiles says. He's suddenly exhausted, and lapses into silence for the rest of the drive. Allison waves as she drops him off, and he jogs inside. Entering his father's hospital room is surreal. It's as if no time has passed at all. Everything is exactly the same as it was before he left it. He sits down and starts doing his homework.

It's late before he knows it. He wonders if he had fallen asleep. Slowly, he packs up his things. Since nobody's looking, he presses a kiss into his unconscious father's forehead before leaving the ICU, making the nurse promise to call if anything changes. He's not waiting around for Melissa to come shepherd him back to her house. He wants his own shower, his own bed.

But when he reaches his house, he finds it impossible to go inside. He hasn't been there in thirty-six hours. Who knew what could have happened in the meantime? It might not be safe. Somebody else could be inside. Peter could be lying in wait for him, knowing that he had figured out who was behind his father's 'accident'. He sits down on the front porch and texts Scott.

It's dumb, but Scott doesn't make him feel dumb. Scott goes in first and checks every room, every closet, even under all the beds. He pronounces the house safe, so they lock the doors and windows. Ten minutes later, they're unlocking them, because Lydia has showed up, and of course Derek stalks in about half an hour after that. Stiles makes everyone cocoa – even Derek, who looks at it like he has no idea what planet Stiles is from – and they fall asleep in a pile in Stiles' bedroom.

The next day is somewhat exciting, or at least more exciting than the day before. Stiles gets a call from the hospital at about ten AM – fortunately in the middle of history, not chemistry – to let him know that his father woke up briefly, was able to give his name but got the date wrong, and then lapsed back into unconsciousness. Stiles wants to go back to the hospital, but the others persuade him not to.

Derek, meanwhile, has been prowling around the same area where his father was hit by the car, about four miles from the Hale house, further out of town. He finds two traps that the Argent family has set, but nothing else. Stiles spends most of the afternoon trying to hack into his father's cell phone account, but no matter how many variations he tries, he can't get the username and password correct. It seems that his father has actually heeded all those warnings about not using a loved one's name, and putting in at least one number and at least one symbol.

Sheriff Stilinski wakes up again in the evening, and again only briefly. He tries to count backwards from ten and gets it right except for flipping six and seven. But he doesn't know where he is, doesn't remember what happened, and for the few minutes he's awake, will only call Stiles by his given name. He can't seem to remember the nickname.

The doctor sits down with Stiles and Melissa to talk about Stilinski's prognosis. Scary words like 'traumatic brain injury' and 'cerebral contusion' are used. Stiles takes copious notes so he can research on his own, and asks intelligent questions. The gist that he gets is that at this point, they are no longer worried about his father's survival but about his long-term functioning. Impairments to motor coordination, memory, and speech are possibilities. Rehabilitation is discussed and specialists are recommended. Stiles can barely take it all in, so he continues to take notes.

Melissa absolutely refuses to bring him home after that conference; she drives them both back to the McCall house and makes them macaroni and cheese. Stiles tries to eat, he knows she's worried, but the food sticks in his throat. Scott comes home from lacrosse practice and wherever he went with Allison afterwards in a good mood, but takes one look at Stiles and drops all his stuff on the floor.

Derek sneaks in around ten, coming in through the upstairs window, and eventually puts Stiles in a headlock to get him off the computer so he'll stop terrifying himself with research on traumatic brain injuries. Once Stiles is on the bed, pinned underneath two hundred pounds of extremely irritated wolf, he doesn't try to get up.

Instead, he says, "Hey . . . if I had died in the trunk of Peter's car, do you think my dad would be okay right now?"

Derek is wolfed out, so it's Scott who replies with, "Oh my GOD, you fucking idiot, never say anything like that again."

"It was just a question," Stiles mutters. Derek makes his opinion clear by putting a paw over Stiles' mouth.

"A stupid question," Scott says. "Look, I have to go shower. Derek, if he says anything else retarded . . . hug him or something."

Stiles sputters a little, but he waits until Scott's gone and the water's running to speak again. "It wasn't a stupid question. He wouldn't be involved in any of this if it weren't for me."

Derek shifts back, abruptly, and says in a tone that approaches impatient, "And you wouldn't be involved if Scott wasn't a wolf, and Scott wouldn't be a wolf if Peter hadn't wanted a pack, and Peter wouldn't have wanted a pack if Kate hadn't burned the house down. So can you stop assigning blame to yourself like your father wouldn't kick your ass just for implying that you'd rather be dead?"

"I didn't say I'd rather be dead," Stiles says, "and stop shifting back when you're in bed with me, for Christ's sake."

"Stop saying idiotic things and I won't have to."

"You remember that you're naked, right?"

"You're under some mistaken impression that that matters to me," Derek says. Then he huffs out a sigh. "Look. Stiles. You know that if you asked your father, there's no way in hell he would rather that have happened. You could go back and forth with it for ages. Do you think I don't know about survivor's guilt? I ran through _every_ scenario in my head after my family died, all the different things I could have done, sacrifices I could have made. But you'll only drive yourself crazy doing that, because the past can't be changed. If you want to make things better, you have to do it going forward."

Stiles stares at him. "Look, uh," he finally says. "I know that you're probably making all sorts of really good points, but let me tell you that I'm not hearing a word of them because you're _naked and on top of me_."

"Oh." Derek looks at him for a moment, then clears his throat and rolls over, being careful to pull the sheets with him. "Sorry."

"Well, on the upside, you've successfully made me no longer wish I was dead," Stiles says.

"That, uh, that's good."

"Why don't you just go back to being a wolf so we can never speak of this again?" Stiles suggests, so Derek does, and by the time Scott comes in from his shower, they're both asleep.

* * *

Stiles has heard all about how awkward Argent family dinners are from Scott, but he figures that he has a leg up where that's concerned. After all, Chris Argent doesn't have to worry about his daughter's potential defloration while he's there. That's what he thinks, at least, until Gerard seems to decide that Stiles and Allison would be a wonderful couple during their first training session, when he sees how at ease and comfortable they are with each other. "That's the key to a great relationship," he declares, with a grandfatherly twinkle in his eye.

Allison finds this rather hilarious, until Stiles quietly takes her aside while Gerard is looking for something he wants to show them and suggests that they play it up. After all, Gerard is the one who cut the omega in half; Gerard is the one who has declared jihad on all werewolf-kind. The more they can do to keep Scott from attracting his attention, the better. Allison reluctantly agrees, and even manages to blush on command a few times, and Stiles keeps himself intentionally clumsy if they get too close to each other.

Chris obviously doesn't believe this show for an instant, and Stiles isn't sure whether he should be amused or insulted. After all, why would Allison ever want to date someone like him? He can clearly recall Scott saying that about nine hundred times when he and Allison first got together. He sort of had a point. But Stiles doesn't think that has anything to do with Chris' attitude; he just thinks that Chris knows his daughter better than that.

Either way, he doesn't care. It's been a hell of a long week.

His father is still in the intensive care unit, due to the extent of his injuries. He's been conscious on and off, and never for very long. He improved steadily for the first two days after waking up the first time, but then lapsed back into what the doctor called a 'depressed state of consciousness'. Stiles spent another panicked night in the hospital while the doctors did tests. After that, Stilinski's recovery had been slow and unsteady, with what felt like more loss than gain.

Some nights, Stiles sleeps at his own place, and sometimes he stays at Scott's. It doesn't really matter to him where he goes. He lets Melissa steer him around. But as the days drag by and his father doesn't make a miraculous recovery, and no sign of Peter Hale is found, Stiles becomes increasingly aware that he is going to have to handle himself.

That's why he's currently at the Argent's dinner table.

It's an interesting family dynamic, now that he has a chance to observe it up close. Chris, who seems angry about everything all the time, who loves his daughter but won't directly meet Gerard's gaze, who brings up uncomfortable topics and then watches everyone squirm. Victoria, who can switch between terrifying ice queen to warm mother figure faster than Stiles can blink, who wants to know his real name because she thinks nicknames like that are silly, who thinks that werewolves are not an appropriate subject for the dinner table but can't hide the bloodthirsty gleam in her eye whenever they're mentioned. Allison, who has her streak of rebellion well-tamped down but still becomes awkwardly silent much of the time, who winces every time someone makes a comment that would make Stiles uncomfortable if he hadn't already been prepared for what a disaster this was going to be.

And Gerard. Gerard, who dotes on his granddaughter and tries to set her up with the average boy who wants to become a hunter. Gerard, who cut an omega in half. Gerard, who makes jokes about his age and constantly takes pills. Gerard, who wants most of the people Stiles cares about dead, and is training Stiles to help make it happen.

The first training session was rather eye-opening, Stiles has to admit. One of the men who Stiles has taken to calling the 'Argent lackeys' came in to help with a demonstration. He's at least six foot three and built like a tank. "The trick," Gerard said, "is to use their strength against them. You have to be fast." And he showed Allison and Stiles how to move with an opponent, how to use their momentum and avoid their blows. Stiles was skeptical at first, and the first time he ducked underneath a hit and sent the man careening over his shoulder, he stopped and stared. "That's the ticket!" Gerard crowed.

"So how did you like your first training session?" Gerard asks, once they're all sitting down over pork chops and mashed potatoes.

"It was really amazing," Stiles says. "I totally get what you mean now, about fighting against a stronger opponent." He takes a drink of his water as Gerard beams at him and adds, "I want to thank you again for being willing to teach me, sir."

"Nonsense!" Gerard says. "This world needs more young men like you. Men with conviction."

Chris sets his glass down with a thunk and gives Stiles a narrow-eyed look. Stiles just gives him an innocent look in return. He finds it interesting that Chris hasn't told Gerard that he doesn't think Stiles should be trained. That he doubts Stiles' loyalty. Why? Is he afraid of what Gerard would do? Or does he not want his own father to know that Allison was dating a werewolf right under his nose?

"It's too bad I can't apply that conviction to my chemistry homework," Stiles says with a sigh. Harris has been increasingly obnoxious lately, almost smug about Sheriff Stilinski's condition. He had divided the class into pairs and then deliberately given Scott and Stiles an assignment that would require three times as much work as everyone else.

Seeing Gerard's questioning look, Allison says, "Mr. Harris, our chemistry teacher, likes to take his bad moods out on Stiles."

"Oh? Why is that?" Gerard asks.

Stiles heaves a sigh. "My dad had to question him about his role in a crime. I guess he took it personally."

"Was he guilty?" Gerard asks.

"Yeah, and actually my dad said he had enough evidence to press charges, but I guess he decided not to because it was a long time ago, and Mr. Harris was pretty young then," Stiles says. "Apparently, he didn't appreciate the gesture."

"What sort of crime was it?" Gerard asks.

Stiles wonders what would happen if he looked the old man in the eyes and said 'arson'. He doesn't, though. He knows instinctively that Gerard is dangerous, in a way that Kate was and Chris isn't. He's still not sure about Victoria; he finds her so hard to read. So instead he just shrugs and says, "I don't really know the details. My dad doesn't talk about work stuff a lot."

"How is your father doing?" Chris asks from his end of the table.

Stiles forces a smile. "He's doing really well," he says. "Still having some speech difficulty, and he gets confused a lot, but the doctors say that's normal and hopefully it'll pass. They're hoping to get him out of the ICU by the end of the week, and into rehab after that."

"Have they come any closer to catching who did it?" he asks.

It feels like his eyes are boring into Stiles' skull. Stiles just keeps the same fake smile plastered on his face and says, "Not yet, but the police out here are great. I'm sure they'll find whoever did it."

"There hasn't been much about it in the papers," Chris says. "What was he doing out there so late at night?"

"Dad," Allison says, "I don't know that Stiles is really comfortable talking about this, everyone at school has already asked him so many questions . . ."

Stiles reaches over to her and puts his hand over hers, giving it a quick squeeze. "It's fine," he says. "I don't know what my dad was doing out there. There had been an attack on the ambulance, so I guess it probably had something to do with that."

"Was he looking for somebody?" Chris asks.

Stiles just shrugs.

"They still haven't found Peter Hale, have they?" Chris presses.

Stiles puts his fork down and says, "No, they haven't. But they will."

Victoria clears her throat and says, "Allison, how is your chemistry assignment going?"

"It's finished already," Allison says. She gives Stiles a shy smile and says, "I can help you with yours, if you need me to . . ."

Gerard gives them both a pleased smile. Then he says, "Well, I'll see what I can do about this chemistry teacher's behavior. Seems pretty unprofessional, to say the least." When both teenagers give him a blank look, he says, "Oh, I must have forgotten to tell you – I'm going to be the principal at your school."

"Wow," Stiles says, before he can think better of it. Allison is staring at Gerard with an expression that approaches horror on her face, probably thinking of how her whole family is going to be spying on her to make sure she's not spending time with Scott. In an effort to take attention off her, Stiles continues, "That's uh, I didn't know you had that sort of work experience."

"My boy, I've been all over the worlds and done all sorts of things," Gerard says. "I think I can handle some high school students."

"You say that like someone who has never met Jackson Whittemore," Stiles says. "Beacon Hills' resident jock extraordinaire."

"He's not that bad, Stiles," Allison says, regaining some of her humor.

"You only think that because he did all that sucking up to you because he wanted to, hey, can I have some more of those potatoes, Mrs. Argent? Because they are spectacular."

Chris glares at Stiles while Victoria passes him the potatoes. Then he glares at his daughter. "Allison?"

"It's nothing, Dad. Jackson's a nice guy."

Chris doesn't look convinced, but Gerard gives a little laugh and says, "Come on now, Chris, it can't surprise you that the boys fight over her! As long as she doesn't let it go to her head, there's no harm in it. But I still say you two should think seriously about what I said earlier," he adds to the two teenagers. "Finding someone who's willing to live the hunter lifestyle can be tricky, Allison. You shouldn't pass this young man by just because he's not the star lacrosse player."

"Gerard," Allison protests, clearly embarrassed.

"All right, all right," Gerard says. "Just offering my advice, as someone who's older and wiser."

Victoria changes the subject, asks Allison about her weekend plans, and the rest of dinner is fairly painless. "So . . ." Allison says to Stiles, as they're saying goodbye on the front porch. Gerard is conspicuously lurking, so Allison pastes on a smile. "Do you want to go running with me tomorrow morning before school?"

Stiles thinks it over. He's already getting up at five AM so he can spend some time in the hospital with his father before school starts. If he tries to get up any earlier, he suspects that one or more wolves won't actually let him leave the house. "Can't," he says. "Gotta go see my dad."

"Oh," Allison says. "Maybe some other time then."

Stiles leans over and kisses her on the cheek. "I'll see you tomorrow."


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

It becomes obvious to Stiles that he isn't going to want to wait for wolfsbane seeds to grow into plants, not to mention that he has something of a black thumb. In ninth grade biology class, he had managed to kill pretty much every plant he tended, in a variety of means. So with that in mind, he calls almost every nursery in a hundred mile radius trying to find someone who has the actual plants. Nobody does. "It's highly toxic, you know," he's told, no fewer than six times.

His frustration must show, because after his 'run with Allison', which he has learned is code for 'let's go make out with Scott in the woods', something he is not particularly interested in doing, Gerard asks him about it. Chris is 'observing' their training session, which seems to be code for 'sit in the corner and menacingly clean his knives'. Stiles is learning that he does not like the euphemisms employed by the Argent family.

"Not trouble at school, is it?" Gerard asks.

"No, it's just," Stiles thinks about it and decides to tell the truth. What the hell. "I was calling around, hoping to find someone with some wolfsbane seedlings I could buy so I wouldn't have to wait for seeds to grow from scratch, but nobody around here carries it."

Gerard gives him a surprised look. "Oh, that's not a problem. Chris, we have some we could give to him, don't we?"

Chris looks up with a frown. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it. He's not a hunter yet."

"I just want some to plant by our front and back door," Stiles says. "I only need a few."

"Sure." Gerard gets up and leaves the room.

Chris glares at Stiles. "I don't know what game you're playing here, but – "

"But what?" Stiles meets his gaze. He is calm; he is in control. He will handle this shit. "You going to tell Gerard my best friend is a werewolf? Don't lie to me. I know you won't. He scares you, even if you won't admit it. He's not obeying the code; he's crossing lines you won't cross. So you're not going to say a word to him about me or about Scott."

Chris gives him a flat look and says nothing.

"As for the 'game' I'm playing," Stiles says, "it's called 'learn to protect myself', and I'm racking up quite a few points."

"That's not what concerns me," Chris says. "What concerns me is who you think you're protecting yourself _from_."

"Well," Stiles says, "that is the question, isn't it."

Gerard comes back in then, and Chris goes back to glaring. The older man is carrying a cardboard box with three wolfsbane plants in it, two of which are flowering. "Now be careful with this," Gerard says.

"Toxic to humans," Stiles says. "Got it."

He heads home a little early so he can make a stop to get bigger pots to plant them in; Gerard put them in Dixie cups and that obviously won't last. He reads up on what kind of soil and sunlight the plants like, then drives back to his house. He pots them in the garage, as far away from the house as he can get. Wolves seem to have trouble even with proximity, so they can't be anywhere near his room, but it's too cold to plant them outside.

The first he gets transplanted with no trouble, but by the time he's working on the second, his hands are starting to feel strange. His fingers and palms tingle and burn. The feeling has spread up his arms by the time he finishes with the second plant, and he says, "Fuck," as he recognizes the symptom from his reading. "Shit, they weren't kidding about this stuff."

He leaves the third plant in its cup and goes inside to thoroughly scrub his hands. The burning, pins and needles feeling persists for a few minutes, after which his hands go numb. He can barely handle his laptop enough to determine that he probably doesn't need to go to the emergency room since the feeling never went up past his elbows, and therefore his heart won't be affected. He takes his pulse and finds it normal, even and steady.

"Shit," he says again, and collapses on the sofa with a movie.

Within an hour, he can feel his hands again, although the sensation isn't exactly pleasant, and his pulse has remained stable throughout all of it. Still, knowing what he knows about wolves, he takes out his phone and sends out a text to all three members of his pack. 'Don't come over tonight. Repotting wolfsbane. Got it all over me. Probably not safe.'

It takes several minutes because he's a little fumble-fingered, but eventually he gets it sent out. Lydia just sends back a reply that says 'k'. Scott's is considerably longer and more creative; the gist of it is that he thinks Stiles is a fuckwit. Stiles can't help but agree, so he doesn't argue. Derek doesn't respond to the text at all.

So it's Stiles' second night on his own since Peter had abducted him, without even his father in the house, and he's not looking forward to it. He thinks about going to sleep at the hospital, in his dad's room, but he's pretty sure the nurses will throw him out. So he locks all the doors and windows, takes a shower, and decides to try to sleep. He leaves the light on and climbs into bed.

Half an hour later, he's still awake, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when someone knocks on his window. He's practically hyperventilating when he twitches the curtains aside to see Derek giving him a glare that's even more ferocious than usual. "Didn't you get my text?" Stiles asks, through the closed window.

Derek glowers. "What are you doing with wolfsbane?" he growls.

Stiles stares at him. Then, after a long pause, he says, "Good night, Derek," and draws the curtains closed.

He's pretty sure that Derek is going to spend all night sitting on his roof sulking, which amuses the hell out of him, so he goes back to bed and even manages to sleep for a few hours. Then it's off to the hospital, where his father has taken a turn for the worse again. He's awake, but confused, rambling incoherently and complaining of pain in his legs and feet. The doctor mentions getting an MRI of the spine, in case there's a nerve injury that was missed. Stiles sits with his dad and tells him about the book he's reading for English class. This calms him down somewhat, but then he starts insistently asking for Stiles' mother and getting upset when Stiles tries to remind him that she's been dead for years. Stiles finally gets him calmed down, but then has to lock himself in the bathroom for nearly half an hour so he can have his hysterics in private.

At school, he doesn't want to talk to anybody, and actually manages to get through the first half of the day without saying a word, which has to be some new kind of record. Scott catches up with him at lunch and thrusts a pair of gardening gloves at him.

"I can buy my own gloves, you know," Stiles says, giving him a look. "I just didn't realize I would need them."

Scott gives him a worried frown. "You were handling something like that without having gone on a full research binge about it?" he asks. Personally, he'd had no idea that wolfsbane was poisonous to humans, but he's definitely surprised that Stiles didn't know, particularly since he's growing it.

"No, I did know that, I just didn't know it could be absorbed through the skin like that," Stiles says. "I've kinda been doing a lot of research lately, okay? Not every single detail is going to sink all the way in."

Scott takes a deep breath and shoves the gloves into Stiles' bag. "The first thing you need to do is stop doing internet research about your dad."

"First you're telling me to research more. Now you're telling me I'm researching too much. Make up your freakin' mind, why don't you?"

"I'm telling you that some topics are off limits."

Stiles is clearly unimpressed. "Uh huh," he says, and starts to walk away.

Scott follows him, not about to be fobbed off. "You are, aren't you. You're still getting on the internet and scaring the shit out of yourself every time someone isn't watching you."

"Look," Stiles says, "if there was a way to research my dad's condition without scaring the shit out of myself, I would be all over it. But unfortunately, he has what's called a traumatic brain injury, and in case you can't tell by the words 'traumatic', 'brain', and 'injury', it's some pretty scary stuff."

Scott stands in front of him and grabs his friend by the shoulders. "Stiles, just . . . just _stop_ for a while. Just a day or two. I mean, I know that research and learning is how you stay sane even on a good day, but give the doctors a chance. They haven't screwed up, have they?" he adds. It's a real question. If Stiles says they have, Scott will be on the phone to his mother within moments. "Just pick another topic. God knows we're in enough trouble in general that there should be plenty to choose from without you finding the worst version of everything that could happen to your father."

"No, the doctors haven't screwed up," Stiles says, "but at the same time he isn't exactly getting _better_, and I want to know why. And not just 'well, it happens' or 'recovery is a slow road' or 'you have to be patient'. I want to know _why_."

"Is he getting worse?" Scott asks, because he visits, of course he visits, but he doesn't know Sheriff Stilinski as well as Stiles does. He lets go of Stiles' shoulders, but stays close. "Do the doctors have any idea why he isn't getting better?"

"He . . . he has good days and bad days," Stiles says. "Some days he looks great and the doctors are like this is good, we've turned a corner, it's all uphill from here. But then he just . . . crashes. And nobody really knows why it's happening." Stiles feels the frustration building up, a lump in his throat that's difficult to swallow or speak around. He's not even aware of the fact that he's clenching his fists so hard that his fingernails are leaving marks in the skin of his palms.

Scott can actually smell Stiles' impending panic. He reaches out and wraps a hand around Stiles' arm. Comfort by touch has become habit of late, but he tries to keep it small while at school. Then Scott does what he usually does when he wasn't sure what to do. He flails at the situation, grasping at straws. "Uh . . . are they sure it's something wrong with his brain? I mean, can't other things mess that up?"

"Yeah, they uh . . ." Stiles wipes his eyes with the corner of his sleeve. "They think it might be his spine, something they didn't notice at first. They're doing an MRI today. But that's kind of my fucking _point_, Scott. I mean, why the hell do you think I'm researching? To try to figure out what's going on."

Scott moves closer to Stiles as he senses the meltdown that's been hovering around Stiles for days getting closer to the surface. He personally thinks that Stiles might feel better after having a meltdown, if he and whoever witnessed it didn't die of embarrassment first. For now, he just moves closer, to block other people's view. He opens his mouth to say that Stiles didn't have to do the research because the doctors have done it, but then closes it. What is he supposed to do, tell Stiles to sit around helpless? He heaves a sigh, more of an annoyed growl. "Fine. But no more in the middle of the night because everyone gets irrational then. And you need to eat more, and . . ." He trails off, not knowing what to say. He's just worried. Stiles looks like he's ready to fly apart at the seams. And it isn't a fragile look, exactly. He might have hysterics in a corner, but then again he also might take out some of the lacrosse team if they said the wrong thing.

Stiles, seeing the frustrated concern on his friend's face, forces a smile. "Okey dokey. No more research in the middle of the night. Check."

Scott rolls his eyes, amused despite himself. "Dude, I can so tell when you're lying. And it has nothing to do with hearing your heartbeat or anything weird. It's because I've known you my whole life."

Stiles holds up his right hand and says, "May God strike me down and take my wi-fi. Anyway, it's not like Derek doesn't wake up every time I get up anyway. Man, he gets growly when he's woken up. Needs his wolf-naps."

"Don't invite trouble!" Scott protests. "We've had shit luck lately. And Derek needs more than wolf-naps to make him anything besides growly." He gives an exaggerated shudder, even though he and Derek have been arguing less now that they had something to draw them together.

"Yeah, but there's like a baseline level of growliness that makes him, well, Derek," Stiles says. "No amount of wolf-naps in the universe will cure that."

"So true. If we ever saw him laugh, we'd have to ask who drugged him," Scott says. He starts walking again, moving towards the cafeteria.

"And what with, and where we can get some," Stiles agrees.

"So we can slip some to Harris," Scott says, but mostly underneath his breath. They don't need anyone hearing a comment about drugging a teacher, even a joking one.

"Yyyeeeeah," Stiles says, tucking his hands behind his head. "I don't know if we'll need to worry about him much longer. Gerard Argent said he would, uh, make sure his unprofessional behavior doesn't continue. And knowing what I do of Gerard, that may include tweezers and Tabasco sauce. Which, as much as Gerard scares the shit out of me, I would find deeply satisfying."

Scott's eyebrows went up. "I don't even know what to say to that. So many conflicting emotions."

Stiles gives a little shrug. "I'm learning a lot from him. I just have to be careful."

"And I'm glad," Scott says. "I feel better knowing you'll have a fighting chance against someone like me." He wasn't about to say 'werewolf' in the cafeteria. "But Allison's family is screwy. Even she thinks so. And he scares her. Not that she's said anything. But he does."

"No shit, Sherlock," Stiles says. "Guy's got issues. See above: I have to be careful. I'm pretty sure that if he knew I hung out with a werewolf, he'd chop _me_ in half."

At that, a muted growl escapes Scott's throat, which conveys his opinion fairly clearly.

Stiles arches his eyebrow, then reaches out and snags Scott's pudding cup. "Keep it down there, Fido," he says, "before somebody notices."

Scott takes a deep breath and does his best to rein in the non-human and therefore not-safe-for-school instincts. He lets Stiles have the pudding cup uncontested; at least it's voluntary calorie intake. "Is he teaching you things that would be useful for the rest of us?"

"Sure," Stiles says. "I'm learning all about the different ways to kill werewolves. Of course, that's not so useful in the long-run because, you know, they're not teaching me about how to _not_ kill werewolves. But hey. I'll be prepared if I happen to run across Peter Hale. Which is all I really care about."

"I say we just nuke him." Scott surveys the rest of his lunch, then nudges the bag of crackers and the apple into the space between himself and Stiles, hoping that his friend's restless hands will just steal one or the other before he can think about it. Stiles has so far made no move to take out his own lunch, and Melissa has been giving him twice as much food because she knows that Scott will try to give half of it to Stiles. "Anyway," he continues, assaulting his sandwich, "it tells us what sort of things hunters will be trying to do, which is useful, right?"

"Yeah," Stiles says. "I've gotten some pictures of the traps they use. If we can make some mock-ups, we can figure out the fastest way to escape from them, in case you get caught." He twitches, then reaches out and grabs the apple, sinking his teeth into it in a very wolf-like fashion.

Scott does a mental cheer at Stiles' food 'theft', and doesn't really notice the way he and the other wolves are rubbing off on Stiles. Predatory movement towards food is just a norm now. "Awesome."

"We can experiment on Derek. You know that dick actually still showed up last night even after I texted you guys saying not to come?"

"To do what, get poisoned?" Scott asks. He's wearing his confused face. It's an expression that gets a lot of mileage when Derek Hale is involved.

"To yell at me and demand to know why I had wolfsbane in the first place," Stiles says, gnawing another chunk of apple. "Duh."

"To . . . poison werewolves?" Scott asks, just to be sure that he's on the right page here.

"Yeah, if they try to get fresh with me," Stiles says.

Scott just snorts at that.

"Anyway, I shut the curtains in his face," Stiles says, "so be prepared to listen to him whining about my lack of respect for him for the next month."

That makes Scott grin. "I wish there had been a way to get his expression on film."

"Yeah, maybe for once he _had_ an expression," Stiles says. He lets out a little sigh. The apple and the pudding have settled somewhat uneasily in his stomach, and he keeps thinking back to his father that morning, so confused and upset. His father has always been the rock that Stiles has leaned his back against; he feels unsteady, unanchored, with him gone. He reminds himself that he is tough, he is capable, he is handling this shit. "I've gotta go. I want to talk to Danny about trying to hack into my dad's cell phone account since I can't manage to guess his password. Later?"

"Yeah," Scott says. "If we both survive the day, I'll go with you to see your dad after school."

* * *

The Argent house, Stiles is slowly learning, is more like a fortress. There are really only a few parts of it that are anything like a normal house: the kitchen and dining room, a couple bedrooms upstairs. The garage is, as Scott had famously described it, the Wal-Mart of guns. But it's more than that. It's corridors that end in doors that are locked and alarmed. It's pictures that hide wall safes. It's the tabletop that flips up to reveal a rack of guns underneath.

All of these are things that Stiles casually discovers while he's wandering around the house unobserved. Training with Gerard usually takes place in the rec room, which is a large, open space, and sometimes outside. There are plenty of times when Gerard will be showing Allison how to do something and Stiles will excuse himself to use the bathroom, or volunteer to go get some ice when one of them gets bruised, or run outside to check the weather. During these brief trips, he pokes, he prods, he explores. Chris is never home, off doing business, and Victoria is often out as well.

He's not sure how knowing any of this will help later, but gathering information is something he does, just to occupy himself. Where he wants to go is the basement. He saw Gerard punch in the code once and jog down the stairs, before coming up with a special trap to show them. That's where he went to get Stiles the wolfsbane, as well. Stiles is sure that all the real equipment, all the important secrets, will be behind that door and down those stairs.

Three weeks have passed since Peter abducted him; two weeks since his father was injured. He's still twitchy and avoids crowds whenever possible, but his resolve is made of steel. He is going to take care of himself. He can handle this. So he ignores Scott's worried looks and the way Derek scowls at him. Although to be fair, Derek has been scowling less lately. Not so much that anyone who didn't know him would notice, but Stiles notices.

It had occurred to him after the night they spent in the hospital that if Derek really was so touch-oriented, he had to be starved for contact by now. When he and Scott had found out that the murdered girl in the woods was Laura Hale, they had jumped straight to 'how awful, Derek killed his sister'. Later they had found out that wasn't true, but somehow had never jumped back to 'how awful, Derek lost his sister'. It explains a lot about his behavior, now that Stiles is thinking about it.

So the next time he sees Derek after the wolfsbane incident, he goes right up to him and gives him a hug. "What the hell are you doing?" Derek asks, his tone annoyed but his arms already sneaking around to circle Stiles' waist.

"Hugging you," Stiles says.

"Cut it out," Derek replies, one hand knotting in the back of Stiles' shirt, practically squashing Stiles' face into his chest.

"'Kay," Stiles says, and lets Derek hold onto him for another moment before letting go. From then on it's anything goes as far as he's concerned. He flops in Derek's lap when they're watching movies; he curls up right next to him when they're sleeping in the puppy pile. It's all done in the name of 'annoying Derek', and if one or both of them gets comfort from it, well, that's nobody else's business. They never have to tell.

Life is looking up in other areas, too. Three days after the Argent family dinner from hell, Mr. Harris stands up in front of the entire chemistry class and apologizes to Stiles for his behavior. He looks deeply angry to have to do so, particularly the part where he says, "I should be grateful to your father for his leniency, rather than punishing you for the fact that he was doing his job." Stiles grins throughout this entire speech, a shit-eating grin that Harris obviously wants to slap off of his face. He can't help but wonder exactly what Gerard threatened him with. He probably does not want to know.

If only his father's condition would improve, he might feel like he was actually getting his life back together. But every time it looks like they might be able to discharge him from the hospital and into rehab, he takes another turn for the worse. He also can't remember anything that happened before the 'accident', and Stiles still can't find his phone. Derek has found no sign of Peter, and Stiles is ready to tear out what little hair he has in frustration.

With nothing else to do, he focuses on getting into the Argents' basement. He takes a picture of the alarm on the door, both the front and the bottom, where the serial number is displayed. Then he goes home and employs some Google fu to get the name and phone number of the company. He browses their website until he finds the correct model. A quick search through his father's files – he's always known where the backup key to the file cabinet is – and he has the information about Chris Argent that he needs. He gave a statement after Kate's body was found, and all his information is in there: address, driver's license number, social security number.

Ninety-five percent of hacking, Danny told him once, is really more like phishing. Guessing passwords, or in this case, getting them reset.

"Maximum Security alarms, this is Nicole, how can I help you?"

"Hello, Nicole," Stiles says, dropping his voice to a lower pitch as much as he can without squeaking. "My name is Chris Argent, and well, this is embarrassing, but I seem to have forgotten the code to my alarm system."

"No problem, sir," Nicole says. "I can show you how to set it back to the factory default. Let me just get some basic information . . ."

Stiles has everything she asks for. Five minutes later, he has instructions on how to reset the alarm system so it will take six zeroes as a valid password. "Then you can set it to whatever you like," she tells him. He thanks her and hangs up.

Getting into the house when nobody is there is going to be a little trickier, but it's actually easier than he would have expected due to how big and convoluted the house is. He just waits for a night that he knows the family has plans – thank God for lacrosse, thank God for Chris Argent's inability to let his daughter go to a lacrosse game without him lest she start mooning over Scott again – and then excuses himself a little early from training. "There's a neurologist coming to see my dad again," he says. Then he jogs over to the front door. Opens it, waits a beat, lets it fall shut. Darts back into the house and hides in a convenient closet. Nobody has any idea that he hasn't left the house.

Of course, what he doesn't count on is the fact that hiding in the closet is terrifying. It's dark and quiet and altogether too much like being in the trunk of Peter's car. He stares at his watch as the seconds tick by, uses it to control his breathing and try to keep his heart rate even. He reminds himself over and over again that he is in control; he can leave the closet whenever he likes.

Even so, by the time he hears the Argent family leave and exits the closet, he's shaking like a leaf and his body is soaked with sweat. He has to sit in the kitchen for several long minutes, trying to calm himself down. Finally, inch by inch, breath by breath, he recovers. Then he walks over to the door to the basement and follows the steps that Nicole at the alarm company had given him. It works like a charm. He punches in six zeroes. It tells him to set a new code. He punches in six zeroes again. That way, when Chris discovers his code doesn't work anymore, he'll think an electrical glitch reset it to factory default. He might have his suspicions otherwise, but he won't be able to prove anything. It's not a perfect crime, but it's the best idea that Stiles has.

The basement is exactly as Stiles would have imagined it. Racks of weaponry, rows of traps. A lightbox with some plants, including the familiar blue-purple of wolfsbane. Outdoor gear like climbing equipment, protective vests, boots and gloves. More chilling equipment, like duct tape, fishing line, car batteries and clamps, pliers. There are locked cabinets and drawers along one wall; he doesn't see a key anywhere and presumes that Chris keeps it on his person.

It's interesting, truly, and he takes pictures of almost every square inch, but somehow he's disappointed to have found exactly what he expected to find. He takes a case of wolfsbane bullets and the proper gun to match them, and slides them into the bag he's carrying. They'll never notice one missing gun amongst all these, and Stiles is still annoyed that Chris refused to sell him one.

He's about to leave when he realizes he hasn't quite seen everything. There's another door on the far side of the room. It's not alarmed, and although the door has a lock, it isn't locked. So Stiles opens it and looks inside.

He stops in the doorway.

It's a small room, barely five feet square, and quite bare, without even a single cabinet. There's a man suspended by chains, his feet only barely brushing the floor. He's bare-chested, wearing only a pair of black pants that are long past their prime. Blood has dried and crusted on his chest and abdomen. The cuffs around his wrist glint in the harsh, fluorescent light. They're silver, or steel coated with silver. Stiles knows that because he can see the way the skin has blistered and burned where the cuffs touch it. In some places it looks almost like it's rotting away. He can see the man's veins, the telltale dark blue of wolfsbane poisoning. A piece of duct tape is fixed over his mouth, going all the way around his head, over his dark hair. His head is hanging down at first, but when Stiles enters he looks up, slowly. His eyes are glassy with confusion, exhaustion, and pain.

Stiles freezes in place. He forgets to move, forgets to _breathe_. The world stops. Everything stops.

The man in chains is Peter Hale.


	9. Chapter 9

_This is my favorite chapter so far. ^_^_

_Somewhat triggery for torture and geriatric psychopaths and general badness, though._

Chapter Nine

_We took care of him._

Chris Argent isn't in the room, but Stiles hears his words as loud and clear as the first time he spoke them.

_We took care of him. He's not going to hurt you, or anyone else, ever again._

Stiles can only stare, his emotional side frozen while his logical side works through the pieces. Peter had been grievously wounded by the wolfsbane bullets – even now, Stiles can see the scars, lumpy tissue that hasn't fully healed. Two in the abdomen and one in the chest. Chris Argent is an excellent shot. Chris said that they had killed him, but obviously they hadn't. Why not?

Because of Gerard. Because Gerard was crazy, and Chris had known that he would want to carry the sentence of execution out himself. Peter had killed Kate, and whether she deserved it or not, whether the Argents _believed_ she deserved it or not, he had to die for that offense.

But death was too good for Peter, it seemed. And now, the terrifying monster that has ruled Stiles' nightmares for almost a month is hanging in chains, wounded, poisoned, helpless.

Stiles can't help but approach. It's fascinating, compelling, to see the man who hurt him, who overpowered him so easily, taken down to such a state. Peter had been the ultimate monster for all of them. He had done terrible things. He had ripped Laura in half, turned Scott and called him out against his will, murdered half a dozen people in the most brutal, visceral way.

"Quite a sight, isn't he?"

Stiles jumps at the sound of Gerard's voice and nearly knocks into Peter, only keeping his balance at the last minute. He turns to see the old man with his arms folded over his chest, still with that grandfatherly smile on his face, but it no longer reaches his eyes. Stiles stares at him, stares at Peter, and finally whispers, "Yes, sir."

"You know this one, I think," Gerard says. "My son told me that he had caused some trouble for you and your friends."

"Yes, sir," Stiles says, wondering how much Chris told him, how he had explained Stiles' abduction without revealing that Scott was a werewolf.

"Because he wanted to hurt my family," Gerard says, a little louder. Peter's eyes open at the sound of his voice, and there's a flash of some emotion in them – not fear, Peter does not feel fear, but desperate rage and sick anticipation.

Of course, Stiles thinks; in Chris' explanation, Peter Hale wasn't after Scott. He was after Allison. Scott and Stiles were just friends of hers who got wrapped up in it. The details are unimportant. He can breathe a little easier, he thinks, although he's still going to have to do a lot of fast-talking about why he's in the basement in the first place.

"So?" Gerard says, and he gives Stiles an expectant look. Stiles just stares back at him. "What do you think?"

Stiles swallows hard as his brain works at a furious pace to anticipate what answer Gerard wants to hear. He's on thin ice, and he can hear it cracking beneath his feet. But Gerard likes him, Gerard trusts him. He can get out of this intact, if he's careful, if he says the right things. "I think it's a lot less than what he deserves, sir."

Gerard's smile is hard, cold, frightening to behold. "That's because he's in a healing phase right now. You might have had a different opinion if you'd seen him two days ago."

Since Gerard doesn't seem about to kill him for being in the basement, Stiles hazards a question. "Healing phase . . .?"

"Keeping werewolves imprisoned is difficult," Gerard says with a nod, "particularly alphas, which are stronger and more powerful. Even if you use silver-coated chains, which they can't break, much of the time they'll simply rip them right out of the wall. We don't want our friend here getting away, but we also don't want him to die. Why is that, Stiles?"

Gerard seems to want a genuine answer, so Stiles thinks about it for a moment. The obvious answer, 'because death is too good for him', is no doubt true, but it seems like Gerard is reaching for more. Then it hits him, like a hammer to the stomach, and he feels sick. "Because as long as he's alive, there's no new alpha."

"Very good, Stiles," Gerard says, with an approving nod. "It keeps the rest of the pack from gaining in power."

"So you're dosing him with wolfsbane," Stiles says.

"Exactly," Gerard says, now beaming at his favorite student. "It's a very delicate business, don't get me wrong. You have to take into account the strength and stamina of the wolf, the power of the pack, the phase of the moon, the age and potency of the plant – it can be very difficult to give just enough to incapacitate, but not enough to kill."

Stiles nods and says, "Can you keep him here forever?"

"If we do it right," Gerard says. He leaves the small room and goes over to one of the cabinets. The key is on a chain around his neck. He unlocks it and pulls out a tray with what looks like medical equipment on it. Busying himself with what he's doing, he says to Stiles, "What are you doing down here, son?"

Stiles clears his throat and forces his voice to come out normal. "I – I wanted some bullets," he says, and nudges his bag with one foot. "I asked Chris to sell me some – that was before you came here – and he wouldn't. I just don't feel safe at home, and I, I thought . . ."

"You thought Peter Hale was still out there."

"Yes," Stiles says. "But it's not just Peter that I have to protect myself from. It's his pack. They have to know he's still alive. What if they're looking for him?"

"There's no love lost between Peter and his nephew," Gerard says. "Otherwise, we would've been using him as bait two weeks ago. But I can see why you want to protect yourself. You know how to handle firearms?"

"Yes, sir, my father taught me."

"You planning to tell me how you got past the alarm system?"

Stiles swallows again and says, "Not unless you push the issue, sir."

Gerard laughs at that. "You are a clever young man. We don't see nearly enough cleverness in the hunter recruits these days. It's usually these big, brawny thugs that my son likes to recruit. Okay, then, Stiles. I won't push the issue. I am going to tell my son to reset the code, though. I don't know how you got it, but free access to this basement is something that I won't allow. Don't worry; I won't tell him why I think he should change it. I'll tell him that I fouled it up somehow. He'll believe that. Technology and I have never gotten along very well."

"Thank you, sir." Stiles can't believe his luck, although he observes privately how both Argent men seem to think they're protecting him from the other.

"Next time you want something from the basement, just tell me. Empty your bag."

Stiles does promptly, without hesitation. It holds only his school things and the bullets and gun he had taken. Gerard nods approvingly at his choices.

"Look at the time," he says, as Stiles packs his things up. "It's time for Peter's next dose." He goes back to the tray full of medical tools. He picks up a syringe and puts it into a large vial of a liquid that's mostly clear, but has an iridescent shine to it. He carefully draws it up. "Point six seven milliliters today. Tomorrow it will be point six nine. The moon, after all, is waxing." He turns and offers the syringe to Stiles. "Would you like to do it?"

Stiles understands that the question is not a question, and that there is only one answer he can give. "Would – would it be all right, sir?"

"Sure. I'll show you how."

Stiles follows Gerard back into the tiny room. Peter has clearly been listening to their conversation, because he's trying to move now, thrashing against the chains, but with his feet dangling off the floor, he can't get much leverage. He's too weak to move very much. "Fortunately, although the dose requires a great deal of precision, the injection itself doesn't," Gerard says. "You don't need to worry about getting it into a vein. It's toxic pretty much no matter where you put it. I prefer here." He reaches out and presses two fingers into the hollow of Peter's throat. "Just be careful of the bone."

"O-Okay," Stiles says. His voice is trembling, and his hands are shaking like crazy.

"Don't be afraid," Gerard says. "He can't hurt you."

Even now, Stiles isn't one hundred percent sure of that. He's thinking of Peter's face on the lacrosse field, Lydia's blood on his chin, the way he caressed her hair almost tenderly. He's thinking of Peter's face after Stiles rejected the bite, the anger at Stiles' words before he put him in the trunk of the car and left him for dead. He has to take several deep breaths before he can steady his hands enough to push the needle into Peter's neck.

It feels wrong. Peter has done horrible things, Stiles has suffered from them along with everybody else, but this, this is wrong. But he knows that Gerard is watching him, knows that in order to get out of this basement alive, he can't show any pity for Peter.

He presses the plunger all the way down.

The effect is instantaneous. Before Stiles has even withdrawn more than a step, Peter's body begins to shake and convulse. Stiles can hear him trying to scream, trying to _howl_, even through the duct tape over his mouth. The chords on his neck stand out and sweat starts to bead on his chest and forehead. His legs twitch and spasm helplessly.

Then he goes still. His head hangs down limply; there's no movement at all. Alarmed, Stiles says, "Is he – " but then another shudder goes through him. He isn't dead. Just unconscious.

"Well," Gerard says, and guides Stiles out of the room, shutting the door behind him. "Is that better now?"

Stiles' entire body is shaking, although not for the reasons that Gerard thinks. He can feel his heart thudding away in his chest. "That – that was incredible."

"Yes!" Gerard is pleased by this response. "That's _power_, Stiles. Power over the monsters. We can bring them to their knees." He grips Stiles' shoulder, hard. "That's what it's like to be a hunter. You've had your first real taste of it tonight. You're going to go a long way, Stiles. I can feel it. Any time you'd like to give Mr. Hale here his 'medicine' . . . you just let me know."

Stiles nods mutely. Gerard walks him up the stairs and out the front door. Ten minutes later, in his car on the way home, he can still feel the old man's fingers, pressing down into his shoulder like iron.

* * *

Stiles takes his clothes off in his garage, knowing that he smells like wolfsbane and Argent and Peter Hale. He ducks into the house naked and goes straight to the shower. He turns the water up as hot as he can stand and begins to scrub. It's not like Peter was rubbing all over him, but he's pretty sure that wolves are hard-wired to recognize the scent of their alpha, no matter how much they hate him. The wolfsbane might mask it somewhat, but better safe than sorry. Besides, there's a lingering feeling of 'bad touch' from what he just had to do, and the scrubbing is almost involuntary.

It's late when he gets out of the shower, and the lacrosse game will be over soon. If the others come over and find him huddled up in bed, or under it, which is what he feels like doing, he'll undergo an interrogation. So he goes down to the kitchen and starts baking. He hasn't eaten since lunch. His stomach roils at the idea of anything really solid. When he's hungry like this he wants sweet things. He starts making gingersnaps and calls the hospital to check on his father. No change, he's told, which at this point is good news.

All his baking is for naught, however, because when Derek shows up he just takes one look at Stiles and snaps, "What happened?"

It looks like Scott, who is sitting at the kitchen table eating his fourth gingersnap, might argue Derek's tone. Then he either gets a look at Stiles' face or hears the way his heart immediately thuds out of control. "Dude," he says. "Are you okay?" Lydia, sitting next to him, nibbles on a cookie and gives him a quizzical look.

Stiles lets out a breath. Never lie to werewolves. It doesn't get you anywhere. "Yes," he says. "I just, I was over at the Argents earlier. I snuck into the basement to look around and Gerard caught me there. It's okay, he didn't do anything to me, but the guy is pretty fucking scary when he wants to be."

"He just let you go?" Scott asks, skeptical.

"Well, I told him I was there to get some bullets, because Chris wouldn't give me any," Stiles says. "He looked through my stuff and then let me go."

He can't say anything about Peter. He _can't_. He has no idea how Derek would react, but he's terrified that the older man would lose his shit and go storm the castle. Peter has done some terrible things, but he's family, he's pack. And nobody deserves what the Argents are doing to him. So Stiles says nothing about Peter.

"And you're okay?" Scott presses.

"Yeah, he, I guess he likes me," Stiles says. He had told Scott about how Gerard wants to set him up with Allison after their first training session. It's actually come in pretty handy, because now Allison and Stiles have gone on a couple 'dates'. Dates in which they meet Scott somewhere like a club or the mall, and Allison and Scott have a good time while Stiles sits somewhere quiet with his werewolf research or brain injury research. It's a break for all of them. Allison has taken to sneaking out at night and coming to be part of their wolf pile a few times a week. It's nice for Lydia, so she's not the only girl, and it's nice for Stiles, so he's not the only human. Derek resents her presence, but tolerates it for Stiles' sake, because he doesn't want to start arguments. "He thinks I'm just trying to be the best I can be, you know."

"Army strong," Lydia says, and Scott laughs a little at that and reaches for another gingersnap.

Derek, however, is still giving Stiles that piercing glare. "I told you to stay away from them," he snarls.

Stiles knows he's shaking, from a combination of anger, fear, and adrenaline. He sees Scott's smile fade back into a concerned frown and tries desperately to modulate his tone. "And I told you that I wasn't going to stop training with them."

"God _damn_ it, Stiles!" Derek slams his hand against the table. "This isn't some sort of game! He could have killed you tonight! He would kill you in an _instant_ if he knew you were part of a pack. We're weak enough as it is without an alpha. We can't afford to lose anybody!"

"Hey, why don't you lay off him?" Scott's standing now, getting in Derek's face, because people are not allowed to talk to Stiles like that. "He knows it's serious, okay, but he can take care of himself, he's the one who helped me after I became a werewolf and he was better at it than _you_ ever were – "

"I'm finding that really difficult to believe, maybe you just needed the extra help – "

"Stop it!" Stiles shouts at both of them, and much to his surprise, they both stop. He opens his mouth to say something nasty, something about knowing that it isn't a game, if anyone knows that, it's him. But then he sees that the anger in Derek's voice, in his face, is covering desperate fear. That Derek is really afraid. So he clenches his fists until his own rage subsides and then says, "I'm sorry."

"You – you're what?" Derek blinks at him. Scott and Lydia blink at him.

"I know that, that you lost your family," Stiles says. "I know that we're your pack now and you're afraid you'll lose us too. I'm not doing this to worry you, or piss you off. I just want to survive. I want _all_ of us to survive. And if that means taking some risks sometimes, then okay. Because I'm a member of this pack, too, and there are some things that I can do that you can't, so let me do my part. We're stronger together, remember?"

Derek is just staring at him, but when Stiles moves forward and wraps his arms around Derek's waist, the older man hugs him, tight, practically crushing Stiles against his chest. Scott seems to be in some sort of shock after seeing Derek act like he has feelings, but when Lydia steps up and wraps her arms around the pair from the other side, Scott does the same. They stand like that for a few long moments, clinging to each other.

Finally, Stiles says, "Have a gingersnap. That'll help."

Derek growls at him.

"No, really," Stiles says. "The dogs at the station love 'em."

Scott chokes out a laugh. "Really?"

"Yeah, really, why do you think I made them?" Stiles asks, and slowly the group hug dissolves into them standing in a loose clump. "It's either the ginger or the nutmeg; I'm not one hundred percent sure, but either way they go like hotcakes."

"We are not dogs," Derek says, in a voice that would have been considered dangerous if he was directing it at anyone else.

"Oh my God, _really_?" Stiles says. "Thanks for sharing that, Derek; in all my hours of research about werewolves I never realized that dogs and wolves aren't the same – "

Derek cuffs him over the top of the head.

Lydia stuffs a gingersnap in Derek's mouth.

Derek gives her a look, but eats it. Then he reaches out for the tray and eats another. Finally, he looks at Stiles and says, "You're really okay?"

"Yeah," Stiles says. "Shaken up a bit, but okay. When he came down into the basement and startled me there I nearly pissed myself. But believe it or not, most of the time I do know what I'm doing."

"That is hard to believe," Derek says, but Stiles knows he doesn't really mean it. It's Friday night, so they stay up late watching movies and eating gingersnaps. Allison sneaks in at about half past eleven and she and Scott immediately adjourn to the spare bedroom for shenanigans. Lydia haughtily declares that she is due for some primping time, and locks herself into the bedroom, leaving Stiles and Derek alone on the couch together. Stiles is in Derek's lap, his back against Derek's chest, because what, there isn't enough room for everyone on the sofa if they don't share. Derek spent the first half of the movie telling him to move, get off him, he's obnoxious, while the girls giggled together and Scott looked like he wasn't quite sure this was actually happening. By now Derek's arm is around Stiles' waist, and they're both half-asleep.

"You know," Stiles says, "you should take it easy on Scott."

Derek blinks awake. "Where did that come from?"

Stiles shrugs a little. "Just thinking about earlier. When he got in your face like that. See, the thing is," he struggles a little, trying to sit up, and then subsides. It'll be easier to have this conversation if he doesn't have to look at Derek, anyway. "When you say 'pack' and 'alpha', you mean one thing but he hears something completely different. To you, pack is family, and that's a good thing. An alpha is a protector, and you work to gain power because then everyone will be safer. But that's not the way Scott sees it, not at all. Because he was forced into this. Peter never gave him any choice. So when he hears 'alpha', he hears 'guy who's telling me what to do and forcing me to do stuff that I don't want to do', and when he hears that the pack is more powerful with more members, he doesn't hear 'we're all safer together', he hears 'the alpha is using me to gain power _for himself_'."

Derek shifts slightly, uncomfortable with the conversation, and says, "Peter shouldn't have . . . you're not supposed to turn anyone without permission."

"Dude, I'm aware," Stiles says, "but that doesn't change the fact that Peter did. And let's face it, you haven't known Scott as long as I have, and you never met that waste of oxygen who called himself Scott's father. Scott's got honest-to-God issues with male authority, and they come from a very reasonable place. To Scott, you're just one more asshole who's trying to run his life, one more jerk who doesn't respect him. And let's be fair, here, I know that it's just the way you are, but you kind of act that way."

Derek says nothing. Now Stiles turns a little, leaning his back against the sofa with his legs across Derek's lap, so he can look over at him. "You never expected you'd be an alpha, did you?" he asks, and Derek just shakes his head. "Well," Stiles says lightly, "you're doing a great job. So stop overcompensating and being a dick about it."

Derek just gives him a look.

"Inasmuch as that is possible for you," Stiles modifies.

Derek cuffs him over the head again. "It doesn't help that I got a pack of idiot teenagers," he says.

"Aww," Stiles says. "I'm hurt, Derek." He makes a kissy face at the older man and then springs off his lap before Derek can start throttling him.

The nightmares are bad that night, even with Derek curled around him at his back and Lydia nestled into the curve his body on the other side. He tosses and turns, dreaming of Peter ripping free from the chains and attacking him, blood and lurid violet wolfsbane dripping from his jaws. He dreams of Gerard Argent systematically cutting all his friends into pieces while Stiles begs him to stop, wrapped in silver chains and helpless. He wakes up shouting three different times, and the last time, at four AM, he decides to just stay up. The alarm is set for five anyway. Saturday mornings be damned; Allison has to get home before anyone realizes she hasn't slept in her bed that night.

He walks her home in the chilly, predawn air. The wolves all slept through their departure, and he knows that he will probably get an earful about going out by himself, but he doesn't really care. He no longer has to worry about Peter Hale lurking in the shadows.

The Argent house is dark and silent. Allison gives him a hug before climbing up into her second story window. It closes and the curtains are drawn a few moments later. Stiles just stands there and watches the house for several long minutes, thinking about the horror that's hidden underneath.

* * *

It rapidly becomes clear to Stiles that he can't keep Peter a secret forever. There are two reasons for this; one is that it's eating him alive and the other is that he has no idea how to handle it. He doesn't dare say anything to Derek. He wants to tell Scott. He trusts Scott, and Scott is the person he has always confided in. But he doesn't dare tell Scott either, because Scott isn't always the best at keeping secrets from Allison, and Stiles is pretty sure that he doesn't want Allison to know. He wants to trust Allison to side with pack over family. He wants it desperately. But he doesn't. Not yet.

The person he really wants to talk to about it is his father. He even considers it. Stilinski doesn't remember exactly what happened before his accident, but he does remember the week before that, and what happened to Stiles. That means he's a possible confidante about this issue. But just as Stiles is thinking about it, his father's condition takes another nosedive and he actually spends thirty-six full hours unconscious as the doctors make rumbling noises about bradycardia and arrhythmias.

With that option out, he corners Lydia during lacrosse practice, while he knows Scott can't possibly overhear them. They go for a drive in his Jeep, out on the back country roads where he can cruise along at forty miles per hour with the windows down, and he tells her.

He can see from the expression on her face that she immediately grasps all the implications: why Chris didn't kill Peter outright, why Gerard is keeping him alive, how it's keeping their pack from getting stronger. There's one thing she isn't sure of, though, her fists curling around the bottom of her shirt. "Why are you telling me?"

Stiles lets out a breath. "Because . . . I had to tell _somebody_. And you deserved to know, after what Peter did to you."

Lydia nods a little and says, quietly, "Thank you."

"And because I don't know what to do," Stiles says. "I can't just . . . ignore it. For one thing, eventually Gerard is going to want to test my loyalty on a werewolf who isn't, you know, evil. And because . . . what they're doing is wrong." His voice gains in conviction as he speaks. "Peter did some really awful shit. I know that as well as anyone. And I hate to throw around toddler terms like 'they started it', but dude, they _did_ start it. Peter's crazy for a reason. If someone locked all of you in a house and set it on fire, I'd be fucking crazy."

Lydia nods again. "So . . . what, then?"

"I don't know," Stiles says. "I'd never get him out of there, and even if I _could_ . . . I don't know if I should."

"Would you accept him as your alpha?" Lydia asks.

"No," Stiles replies automatically. "_Hell_ no. You?"

"No. None of us would." Lydia stares out the window. "So until we have a new alpha, our pack is crippled. And the Argents know it."

"And it's not just that," Stiles says. "Peter won't _stop_, you know? Kate Argent killed his family, so he killed her, so Gerard is torturing him, so if he ever gets out, he'll just go after the rest of the Argents, including Allison. He attacked her at the house that day, even after he had said he was only going after the responsible parties. Peter's crazy, and he's never going to stop."

"The cycle of revenge," Lydia murmurs. Stiles wonders if she's quoting something. "Have you thought about talking to Derek?"

"I don't dare," Stiles says. "I can't trust him to be objective. Peter is crazy and he's done awful things, but he's still family. And let's be fair, Derek has as much reason to hate the Argents as Peter does. They killed his family, too. The only reason he wasn't one hundred percent on Peter's side is because Peter killed Laura . . . but I don't know what he would do if he found out what Gerard is doing to him."

"If Peter is killed by anyone who isn't a werewolf . . ."

"Then Derek would be our alpha," Stiles says. "Yeah."

Lydia draws her knees up to her chest. "Then I guess the question is . . . how far are you willing to go?"

Stiles stares out the window and thinks of the way Peter howled when the needle went into his throat, thinks of Gerard talking about the thrill and the power of killing werewolves, thinks of the way he broke his own fingers trying to get out of the trunk of a car, thinks about Scott and Derek nearly coming to blows while both trying to protect him. He lets out a breath. "I guess," he says, "that I'm willing to go pretty far to protect my pack."

Lydia reaches over and grips his hand. It's a hard grip, but good hard, firm and reassuring, not iron like Gerard Argent. "Me too," she says.

* * *

Stiles' number one objective now is to get the key to the cabinets in the basement, and he has no idea how he's going to accomplish that. Gerard's is on a chain around his neck, and Stiles is sure that Chris' copy is just as secure. But Stiles is nothing if not resourceful, and at least it's something new to research. He gets a clay impressioning kit and bides his time.

He will have one chance at Peter and one chance only. Thanks to Gerard's help, he'll be able to reset the alarm system a second time. But a third time will not be in the cards. He tends his wolfsbane in the garage and plans carefully. He waits four days and then asks Gerard if he can give Peter his 'medicine'. He needs Gerard to think he enjoyed it, needs Gerard to trust him. So he does it again, and he sees the hatred warring with despair in Peter's eyes, and he knows that he's making the right choice.

It's almost a full week later before he gets his chance at the key. He and Allison are learning about different poisons, specifically those that could be applied to her arrows, and Gerard wants to get some out of the basement so they can see the colors and find out what they smell like first hand. "Stiles, would you mind going down to get them?" he asks. "My knees are having a bit of an off day, I'm afraid."

"No problem, sir," Stiles says. He studiously looks at the ceiling while Gerard punches in the new code, then hands him the key.

"First cabinet to the left," he says. "Be careful handling them. Make two trips if you need to."

"Okay." Stiles bounces down the stairs. He withdraws the clay kit from his pants pocket and presses the key into it, making sure to do it firmly and get a good impression. Then he slides the kit back into his pocket and goes for the cabinet. What he finds is a variety of steel implements. "I don't see them," he calls up the stairs.

"I must be having a senior day," Gerard calls back, laughing. "Maybe the second cabinet, then."

"Okey dokey," Stiles says, and begins opening cabinets and carefully taking photographs with his phone of everything he finds inside. It's a regular cornucopia of horror. Scalpels, blow darts, chains, and then in the back, an old phone. The screen is cracked and there's a tiny smear of blood on one corner, and Stiles is shocked into immobility.

It's his father's phone.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

Stiles' logical side catches up with reality long before his emotional side does. He grabs the phone and opens it up, taking out the SD card and the SIM card before tossing it back to where it started. He shoves the little memory cards into his pocket with the impressioning kit and closes the cabinet. The next one has the poisons. He takes them out of the cabinet and brings them up the stairs. He makes one trip because he does not want to be down there again.

His heart is beating wildly out of control as he sits down with Gerard and Allison to talk about the poisons. It's difficult, no, impossible to concentrate. He feels physically sick with his discovery, and doesn't dare risk Gerard finding that out. But while the old man talks about the different effects the poisons have, Stiles' brain is spinning in an entirely new direction.

How could he have been so stupid to have missed it? If Chris had caught Peter Hale right after the incident at the Hale house, Peter obviously wasn't driving the car that ran his father off the road. So who was? Who else was in the woods that night? Gerard Argent and his flunkies. They hunted down the omega and cut him in half. The car that Derek had theorized Peter had gotten into had actually been Chris Argent's car. Chris had brought him back to the Argent house so Gerard could pass judgment on him. But what did that have to do with his father?

Stiles is absolutely twitchy with his need to see what's on the memory card of the phone. He excuses himself as soon as is humanly possible, which is when Chris gets home from work. He isn't sure whether or not Gerard will suspect something is up from his departure, but he is sure that Gerard won't kill him while Chris is home.

He gets in his Jeep and drives, drives, drives. He texts the pack to let them know that he's been playing in werewolf poison again, don't come over, don't get on his case, he'll see them tomorrow, he'll be fine. Then he drives. He's almost two hours away from Beacon Hills before he's capable of thinking again. He pulls into another small town with a T-Mobile shop and gets a replacement for his father's phone. He slides in the SIM card and the SD card.

'You have four new text messages,' the phone informs him. Stiles knows what four they are: the four from him, that morning. His father did get Derek's message that the omega had been found and killed. So what was he doing in the woods all night, and how did it relate to the 'accident'?

Fortunately for Stiles, it doesn't take long to find out. His father is good enough with technology that he occasionally uses his phone to take pictures, but he doesn't do much else with it. So when Stiles sees that there are several videos on it now, he pulls them up immediately. Each one is about thirty seconds long. Little chunks of footage in which Gerard Argent murders the omega.

"Holy hell, Dad," Stiles murmurs underneath his breath. "You got this on _film_, Jesus, no wonder they tried to kill you."

Chris Argent is only visible in one of the four videos, and he's near the back, not involved in the actual killing. Stiles knows him well enough now to see the faint frown of disapproval, masked by colder fear, on his face.

There's still a problem, though. The omega was killed not long after midnight; Sheriff Stilinski was not injured until near dawn. What was his father doing in the woods all night?

Some searching through the phone brings up another odd item: a map. Several maps, actually. His father has saved a bunch of locations into his GPS. Stiles brings them up one at a time to find that they're just random spots in the middle of the woods. They were saved in during the middle of the night. The first at one fifteen AM, the second at one thirty-five, the third at two twenty. All the way up until five forty in the morning.

"Dad, what the hell are these?" Stiles murmurs, but without driving all the way back to Beacon Hills, he's not sure he can find out. Then he realizes that there were pictures taken at around the same times, one for each location. He opens the first and . . . it's a picture of the forest. He stares at it for a long moment before he sees the glint of steel. Traps. It's a picture of one of the Argent's traps.

"Jesus, Dad." Stiles feels tears stinging at his eyes. His father had followed the Argents around all night, marking down the location of each of their traps, to keep the pack safe. As it had started to get light out, they must have seen him. They had chased him down. He had run for his car, but he hadn't been fast enough. "Jesus."

They had taken his phone. Gerard had probably seen that it was broken and tossed it into the cabinet, not realizing that anything could be recovered from it. That, or he had wanted to keep it for some reason. He seems like the type of person who covers all his bases.

It takes several minutes for Stiles to catch his breath, for the knot in his chest to harden from sorrow to bitter hatred. All these weeks, Gerard had been treating him like a favorite grandson, courteously asking how his father was, encouraging him to learn to be strong. All the while he had known he was the one who had put Stiles' father in the hospital. Stiles nearly chokes on the rage, it's so strong. Derek had been right. Derek had tried to warn him about the Argents, but he hadn't listened.

Nearly an hour later, he starts driving again. It's late by the time he gets to Los Angeles, but the city of angels is always awake. He finds a locksmith of dubious legality and has them make him two copies from his clay impression. He compares them carefully and decides that they'll be sufficient. They charge an exorbitant amount of money but ask zero questions, which is all he was really interested in.

He takes some Adderall, turns the stereo up, and drives back to Beacon Hills. It's about three AM by the time he gets home. He locks the cloned phone in his father's safe along with the keys to the Argent's basement. Then he naps for about an hour before he goes to visit his father. He's not even sure what he'll find there, how to broach this subject at all.

"Stiles," his father mutters, when he comes into the room. The nurses have given him a disapproving look for coming at such a bizarre time, but they're used to him by now, and that he comes in early so he won't have to miss school.

"Yeah, Dad, it's me," Stiles says, glad to see his father awake and capable of recognizing him. "How are you feeling?"

Stilinski mumbles something. It's a little incoherent. Then he raises his voice. "My feet – my feet are on fire."

Stiles' takes his dad's hand and gives it a reassuring squeeze, rubbing his thumb over the knuckles. Derek's affinity for touch is wearing off on him. "Do you want me to get the nurse?"

"Put them out," his father says. "They're on fire!"

Stiles twitches the blanket back and says, "Nope, no fire here."

Stilinski subsides. "They're burning," he says, almost a moan. "Feel like they're burning. Pins and needles . . . all the way up to my knees."

Stiles' breath catches in his throat.

He knows what that feeling means.

He knows why his father keeps getting worse when it seems like he might recover.

He recognizes the symptoms of wolfsbane poisoning.

"Son of a bitch," he whispers. "Son of a _bitch_."

* * *

It takes almost an hour Stiles' shock to harden into resolve. He is going to go down in history as the human who took down the Argent family, and werewolf hunting be damned. He knows who the monster really is.

But he needs some things; he can't do this alone.

He texts Derek. 'Come to the hospital. Bring that camera you use to monitor the road to the Hale house.'

He considers calling Deputy Carmichael, but decides he wants to get all the evidence, all the proof lined up first. Carmichael isn't a bad guy, but he's also not particularly interested in the opinions of teenagers. He's not an adult who can be trusted.

Melissa McCall, however, is an adult that Stiles trusts. When she arrives for her shift at seven thirty, Stiles has done a bunch of research and corners her as she punches in. "I need you to do some tests on my father."

"You need – what?" Melissa asks, startled.

Stiles shows her the list. "It's a blood test. To check for aconite poisoning."

Melissa folds her arms over her chest. "Stiles – "

"Don't, please don't," Stiles says. "I know you mean well, Ms. McCall, but don't turn this into a 'grasping at straws' situation. I've done my research. He has the symptoms – the parasthesia, depressed levels of consciousness, cardiac dysrythmia."

Melissa frowns. "He doesn't have the gastrointestinal symptoms – "

"Because he's not getting it orally," Stiles says. "You don't get the GI symptoms when it's being introduced through the skin." He sees her starting to doubt, and pushes. "Look, please, please don't ask me to explain everything. All I can say is that I _know_ my father saw something in the woods that night, that whoever ran him off the road did it intentionally. Why else would his phone be missing? And now they're trying to keep him quiet. They don't dare kill him because they need it to look like an accident, or maybe they're planning to eventually, I don't know. I'm not a supervillain, I'm not sure what their end game is, but – "

"Stiles," Melissa says, holding up her hands to slow the torrent of words. "I can talk to his doctor, but I – "

"There isn't time, Ms. McCall, the next dose could kill him, and if they know we're onto them I might never find out who's _doing_ it. Please." He leans on the word hard. "_Please_."

"Oh, Jesus," Melissa says, and sighs. "Okay. I will draw it and send it to the lab. But if you're seriously concerned, we ought to call the police and put a guard on his room – "

"Carmichael won't believe me without proof, he thinks I have PTSD and well, he's sort of right. He's already convinced himself that this was just an accident. I need time to find the car. But don't worry about guarding my father. I'm taking care of that."

Melissa gives him a suspicious look, but then raises her hands in surrender and says, "This will take a couple days to come back."

"I know. I've got some things to do in the meantime."

He needs to find the car. That will be absolutely paramount to building his case, and that's the part he's not sure about how to do. He's still mulling it over, watching his father sleep, when Derek shows up. It's clearly too early in the morning for the werewolf, and he looks somewhat surly, particularly at having been summoned without explanation. It would take too long to give him one, so Stiles just says, "Look," and pulls the blanket back and away from his father's feet. When Derek just blinks at him, Stiles grabs him by the ear and pulls his head down.

Derek rears back and away almost immediately. He stares at Stiles in dawning comprehension. "Who – "

"The Argents," Stiles says. "My father saw them kill the omega. They needed to keep him quiet."

Derek swears softly. "How do you – "

"I found his phone in their stuff." Stiles stands up. "I need the camera set up somewhere that they won't notice it. We're going to catch these bastards. Gerard is always going on about how clever I am, well, he's going to see _exactly_ how dangerous someone like me can be."

* * *

Things, as they say, must be done delicately. Stiles has been up for nearly three days straight, only taking little naps when Derek or Scott forces him to, sustaining himself with gallons of black coffee, double-chocolate cookies, and a lot of Adderall. Scott even threatens to hide his bottle, but Stiles just tells him, truthfully, that he knows where to get more.

For those three days, Stiles has been planning every detail of what's about to happen. There will be no room for error. Not with Gerard Argent.

He had been planning to bide his time when it came to Peter, and wait for a good opportunity. A time when it would be safe to sneak into the basement, when he could do it without getting caught. He didn't want Gerard to know he had done anything, so his original plan had been to add some of his own wolfsbane to the solution they were giving the alpha, and when he overdosed, they would think it was an accident, a miscalculation, or that he had weakened enough that a lower dose was fatal.

What's happening with his father has skewed everything. He can't wait any longer, can't risk leaving his father vulnerable.

Subtlety, then, and strategy, have gone by the wayside. When the cops come, if they decide to search the house, they're sure to find the man chained up in the basement. Whatever's going to be done with him has to be done before then. If they find him, they'll take him to the hospital. The nightmare will wake up, and the cycle of revenge will begin again.

Stiles isn't in this for revenge. But he's going to make damned sure that neither the Argents nor Peter Hale ever lay a hand on his pack again.

Allison has been crucial in helping him with this, which was a huge relief to Stiles. He wasn't one hundred percent sure she could be trusted to pick pack over family. But she can be. She was. She has helped him as much as anyone else, if not more. She's the one who leaves the Argent's back door unlocked so he can sneak in one evening while the family is all out to dinner. He knows they're gone because he watched them leave. That was Allison's idea, too. A celebratory family dinner because she and Lydia made the best grade on their chemistry project. He pulls on a pair of rubber gloves that he stole from the hospital and pulls the door open. Then he stops and just listens.

The house is dark and silent. Stiles takes a few minutes to breathe a sigh of relief. So far, so good. He advances the rest of the way into the house and closes the door behind him, then proceeds over to the basement door. He resets the alarm system. It works just like it did the first time. Then he goes down the stairs. The basement is even creepier this time, now that he knows what it's hiding.

Everything looks the same as it did last time. He takes a minute to verify that the copy of the key he made works, and that everything is still where he remembers it being. It does, and it is. He examines the glass bottle full of wolfsbane extract for a moment, then picks up the logbook. Yesterday's dose was given at exactly eight PM. He won't be due for today's for another two hours. The moon is waning, nearly new, and his dose for the day is 0.29 milliliters.

The syringe holds exactly one milliliter. Stiles carefully draws up the entire thing. More than three times the dose needed. That should be more than fatal.

His heart is beating rapidly now, thudding out of his chest, it feels like, and he knows that Peter knows he's there. He's faced with the sudden, stark reality that he is about to murder someone. Someone who has done horrible things, true. Someone who can't be stopped any other way, also true. But the reality is still there. Stiles doesn't know whether he'll ever be able to look at himself in a mirror again, or face his father when all this is done. It's easier to come to the conclusion that there's no other way than it is to hold the murder weapon in his hands.

He opens the door to the back room.

Peter is still hanging in chains, and this is not a healing phase. There are red, raw marks on his chest where the skin has been scraped away. Burn marks from where the shocks have been put through him. Stiles looks; he makes himself look, makes himself memorize every inch of this man until he's once again sure that he's doing the right thing.

He walks over and takes the tape off of Peter's mouth. His eyes flicker a little, and he tries to say something, coughs, tries again.

"You want some water?" Stiles asks him, and Peter gives a little nod. Stiles was prepared for this. He takes a bottle of water out of the bag that's holding all his things for the evening, and holds it to Peter's mouth. He takes little sips until he can finally swallow easily.

Then he sees the full syringe in Stiles' other hand. He lets out a hoarse little laugh. "Took you . . . long enough," he rasps.

"I'm not doing this because of what you did to me," Stiles says. "I need you to understand that."

Peter looks up at him, his stare boring into the back of Stiles' skull. Then he coughs again. "Of course not," he says.

Stiles meets his gaze. "Do you have anything you want to say?"

Peter's mouth twists into what's almost a smile. "Gerard is the one who tried to kill your father," he says. "He came down here . . . he _laughed_ about it . . . after you were gone that first time. About . . . how naïve . . . and oblivious you were."

Stiles feels his stomach clench down over Peter's words. It's an effort to keep a straight face, even though he knows Peter can hear his heart, that angry pounding in his chest. He takes a deep breath. "I knew the first part," he says, "and the rest doesn't exactly shock me." He sees the surprise in Peter's face. "He may think I'm oblivious, but I'm the one who's been playing him the whole time. He's thrown me a couple curveballs here and there, but this is more or less the way I figured it would go." He meets Peter's gaze again and says, "I will destroy anyone who hurts my pack or my family. You just happen to be first in line."

"Do you promise?" Peter asks, and although his tone is mocking, his smile vicious, Stiles can hear the desperation underneath all of it.

"Yes," he says quietly. "I promise. Gerard will answer for what he's done."

Peter's eyes close, and his head nods forward a little. "I do like you, Stiles," he says. "That wasn't a lie."

"I know," Stiles says, and pushes the needle in right over Peter's heart.

The one thing that has worried him – practically speaking, moral qualms aside – is how long it will take. Derek had survived almost twenty-four hours after being shot with one of Kate's wolfsbane bullets, even though it made him sick immediately. Stiles can't exactly wait around in the basement for a day or two.

But it's quick – gruesomely so. Peter doesn't even get a chance to howl. The blue lines spread out from the site of the injection, lacing his entire body within moments. His body spasms, back bowing with a sickening crack, and he vomits up blood so dark it's almost black, the same way Derek had. Less than a minute passes before he's hanging limply in the chains.

Stiles moves forward to check a pulse, but doesn't need to. He can _feel_ it – the death of the alpha of his pack. Because whether Peter turned him or not, Peter was that alpha. It's a change that shifts the world over an inch, like adjusting the color on a monitor until everything is subtly different although he couldn't put into words why. He feels stronger, healthier, more confident. The tremors that have been coursing through him ever since he entered the Argent house stop. The terrible burning in his throat and knots in his stomach have eased. He can breathe again, hold his shoulders straight. Even some of the fatigue is gone.

He sits down right where he is on the floor and gives himself several minutes to pull himself together. The alpha is dead; long live the alpha.

Nearly half an hour has gone by before he manages to drag himself back to his feet. He wants to take Peter down, but doesn't want to touch the body in case the police do find it. Now it's a waiting game. He has left the door to the basement ajar; Gerard or Chris will notice immediately. Stiles sits back down on the floor.

His phone buzzes and he sees that he has a text message from Derek and one from Scott. He pulls them up. Scott's is, 'r u ok?' Derek's is, 'where are you?'

He types back, "I'm ok, meet you at the house tonight," to both of them and then turns his phone off. He had not counted on the rest of the pack knowing that Peter was dead, although he supposes Derek is bound to notice that he is now an alpha. He doesn't want to hear the rest of their questions. They'll get their answers when this is over.

About forty-five minutes later, he hears the thud of a car door outside. Then the front door opens, and there are voices, Victoria saying something about the poor service at the restaurant in that caustic tone of hers. Chris is trying to placate her, and he sounds a little long-suffering about it. Stiles feels his pulse quicken again and stands up, turning his phone back on and fiddling with it, sending a pre-set text message.

It takes about two minutes. Then Chris, sharp and angry, "Did you leave this door open?" and then footsteps on the stairs.

Chris makes it down first. He and Stiles just stare at each other for a long moment. Then Gerard comes down on his heels, with Allison behind while her mother is demanding, "Get back up here, young lady!" from the top of the stairs.

"Stiles," Gerard says, clearly surprised, "what are you doing here?"

Chris isn't waiting for Stiles' answer; in fact, he doesn't even wait for Gerard to finish the question. He stalks forward and shoulders past the teenager to yank the door to the back room open. Peter hangs in the chains. His blood is all over the floor. Allison lets out a little cry of startled surprise, and Chris turns, trying to block her view of the room. He looks at Gerard and says, "Dead."

Gerard's jaw sets angrily and he advances on Stiles. "Do you have any idea what you've done?" he thunders. "You may have wanted him to pay for what he did to you, but now the pack – "

"Will have a new alpha," Stiles finishes coldly. "Yeah, I'm aware."

Gerard blinks at him, taken aback. It's Chris who asks, quietly, "Then why did you do this, Stiles?"

"Because this?" Stiles points to the room. "This was wrong. Yeah, okay, Peter was kind of a jerk and he did a lot of things he shouldn't have done, but I can't help but remember that he went off the rails because Kate torched his entire family. Maybe he deserved to die for killing Kate. Maybe he didn't. I'm not here to get into a discussion about the death penalty. Obviously I didn't think he deserved to live, or I would have just let him go. But keeping him down here, torturing him to satisfy your sick ideas of justice and cripple the local pack? That was not okay."

"You arrogant little brat," Gerard spits out. "You dare to lecture me on morality?"

"Yeah," Stiles says, "I dare. Actually, I dare quite a bit." He holds up his father's phone. "Here's why."

He sees a flicker of unease in Gerard's eyes and it's a glorious feeling. He revels in it. Chris just looks confused.

"If we're going to go all grade-school and talk about who started it and who killed who," Stiles says, "how about we move on to the fact that you tried to kill my father?"

Gerard's jaw is clenched down over the words. "I don't have any idea what you're talking about."

"Uh huh. Sure. Then why is his phone in your basement?" Stiles asks.

"Dad," Chris says, slowly, "what is he talking about?"

"He saw you in the woods that night," Stiles says. "He saw you kill the omega. He watched you lay the traps. You couldn't let him walk away. So you chased him with your car, and you ran him down."

Chris folds his arms over his chest and looks between the two of them. "Is that true?"

Gerard doesn't even look at his son. He's trying to stare Stiles down, and so far, it isn't working. "You can't prove any of this," he says.

"Actually," Stiles says, "I can prove _all_ of it." He tosses the phone back into the cabinet and kicks the door shut, then strips off the rubber gloves. "See, I took the memory card out of my dad's phone and put it in a new model. So I know that he got video of you killing the omega. You're nailed on that. There is no way in hell you are getting out of it."

Chris looks stricken, at least as much as is possible on his stoic face. Gerard is more angry now, his face turning red.

"Proving you ran my dad off the road, that was trickier but by no means impossible," Stiles says. He figures he'll tell them about it. What the hell? He has a few minutes before the police are due to show up, and it's quite enjoyable to rub Gerard's nose in this. "You certainly had motive, given the video he had, but I can do better than that. See, I found the car. It actually wasn't even that hard. I have a friend who's good with computers. He helped me get into your bank account. I found the receipt for the car rental when you got into town – a black Ford Explorer, exactly the kind of car that hit my father. I also found the receipt for the long-term parking garage in Fresno, paid for the same day as my father was hit, and the car rental place in Fresno where you rented the exact same kind of car, so nobody here would realize that you couldn't drive your car around. You figured you would let it sit in storage until all this had died down, then get it repaired and return it. So I drove out there and took some pictures. My dad really did a number on your bumper, huh? It'll all match. Fibers from his jacket or maybe specks of his blood. Oh, and let's not forget that _great_ tire track you left in the wet ground that they casted right afterwards for comparison."

"Jesus," Chris says wearily, pushing his hands through his hair. "Dad, that's the sheriffof this county that you tried to kill."

"He's one of them!" Gerard roars. "He's on their side! Following us around all night, making little notes about our traps. That son of a bitch got what he deserved!"

"That son of a bitch is my _father_," Stiles snaps. "And the side he's on is _mine_ and my _pack_."

This stops Gerard cold. "What . . . did you say?" he asks, his voice trembling with rage.

"Yeah, big guy, my pack," Stiles says. "You know. Werewolves. They come in packs." He starts to laugh. It's a little hysterical. "Did you really think I was that stupid? That I had no idea what sort of person you were? I wanted to be in your confidence to help keep my pack safe. That was all I ever wanted, at least until I found Peter in your basement and my father's phone in the cabinet. Even then I was thinking about letting it go for longer, so I could learn more, until I realized you were poisoning my father in the hospital."

Chris is so pale that he's practically white underneath his tan. "You what?"

Gerard growls out, "You – you – "

"Don't even _start_ to say I can't prove that," Stiles says, "because I totally can. Laboratory tests showed high levels of alkaloids in my father's blood. I got your lackey on video, dressed in orderly's scrubs even though he's not employed at the hospital, giving my dad an unlicensed foot massage. Swabs of the skin will show what he was doing. We let him get just far enough before we interrupted him to prove that. Oh, and who's got a bunch of wolfsbane extract in their basement, with their fingerprints all over it? You do, Gerard."

Gerard folds his arms over his chest and lets out a breath. "Okay," he says, "what do you want?"

For a moment, Stiles is just blank. "What – what do I – are you trying to _bribe_ me, you piece of shit?"

"Well," Gerard says, "I assume there's a reason you're telling us all of this."

"Oh, yeah," Stiles says. "That's just to keep you busy until Deputy Carmichael shows up with his guys." He sees Gerard open his mouth and says, "There will be no bribing to keep me quiet. I already gave him everything. The phone, the photos of the car, the videos, everything. You're screwed, Gerard. I'm not going to sit down here and dick around." He checked his watch. "He'll be here in about two minutes; I sent him a text as soon as you got home. So you may want to shove a bookshelf or something in front of the door to the back room. Carmichael's not the brightest crayon in the box, and I didn't tell him about Peter so he doesn't know to look for him. Unless you want another murder on your rap sheet, you'd better hide that body."

"You killed Peter Hale," Gerard says. "Not me."

Stiles just gives him a smile. "Now _that_ can't be proven," he says. "My fingerprints aren't on any of that stuff. And he's in your basement, not mine. Who are the police going to believe? The son of the sheriff? Or the guy who tried to murder him?"

Chris takes a breath. "Allison, help me move the cabinet."

Allison jumps to attention and hastens to obey. One of the cupboards isn't bolted to the wall, and after a few moments of grunting, Chris manages to get it moved over to the point where it almost entirely obscures the door. That's good enough for Stiles. Once Carmichael finds the wolfsbane and the sword that killed the omega, right where Stiles has told him they will be, he'll stop searching. He doesn't need anything else from the Argent house. Other cops, better cops, might search the entire property, but not Carmichael.

"Chris," Gerard says sharply, "don't you think we have bigger problems right now?"

"Yes," Chris says, with a final grunt as he shoves the cupboard into place, "but I don't really see much we can do about them."

Gerard gives him a disgusted look and spits out, "Kate would be ashamed to call you her brother."

Before Chris can respond, Gerard pulls out a knife and advances on Stiles. Stiles ducks backwards, dodging the thrust forward that would have caught him right in the gut. He hears Allison let out a horrified noise, but it seems far away and unimportant. The world has slowed down and everything is crystal clear, from the tip of the knife to the mad gleam in Gerard's eyes. He jumps back again and avoids another slashing blow which catches the bottom of his shirt. Then Chris is between them, his gun out and leveled at his father's face.

"Don't make this worse than it is, Dad," he says quietly.

Gerard gives him a look that contains nothing short of hatred. "Get out of my way. I know you won't shoot me. You wouldn't dare."

"He probably won't." Stiles pulls his father's second handgun from the holster he was wearing under his jacket. It's his father's spare, and much too big for him. Lydia had to help him get it adjusted so it wouldn't show every time he moved. Stiles presses the muzzle of the gun into Gerard's ribs. "But I will. I killed Peter Hale and so help me God, I will kill you too, if you force me to."

They hear a car door slam outside. Stiles had told them not to use sirens.

"Chris!" Gerard snaps.

Chris shakes his head. "You crossed a line. You hurt an innocent man. There's nothing I can do for you."

Victoria's voice is heard upstairs. Stiles can't make out what she's saying, but a moment later there are feet pounding down the stairs. Stiles pulls away from Gerard and tucks the gun back in its holster just before Carmichael comes into the room with two uniformed officers behind him. He sees the knife and Chris' gun and immediately pulls his own pistol and barks, "Everybody freeze! Put down your weapons!"

Chris immediately lowers his gun, then drops it to the floor, and puts his hands on his head. Gerard gives all of them a look filled with sheer loathing, and then does the same.

"It's okay," Stiles says to Deputy Carmichael, and gestures to Chris. "He was just defending me."

Chris looks quite surprised to have Stiles intervene on his behalf, but doesn't dispute it. He sends Allison upstairs and allows the officers to search the basement while Carmichael puts handcuffs on Gerard and starts reading him his rights. Stiles feels the tension start to ease out of his shoulders. He knows that the day isn't over yet, but hopefully the worst part is. His father is safe. That's what he needs right now.

Carmichael asks to see Chris' license for his weapon, which he is happy to provide. A few minutes later, they depart with Gerard in tow, the officers loaded down with bags of evidence.

Chris slowly turns and looks at Stiles. "I'm not arrested?" he says.

Stiles shrugs. "Should you be?"

Choosing his words carefully, Chris says, "I was there when the omega was killed."

"Yes," Stiles says, "and you and I will have a chat sometime soon about what exactly that is going to mean for you. But for now, no, you are not arrested."

"Okay," Chris finally says. There's an awkward silence. "You took a hell of a chance, Stiles. You didn't have to confront him like that."

"Oh," Stiles says casually, "I just wanted to get his confession recorded." He holds up his phone. "For extra security, you know."

Chris shakes his head at him. "You could've been killed."

"I could've been," Stiles says, "but I wasn't. Because you backed me up. Which I knew you would. You may not like werewolves very much, but you weren't going to stand there and let him hurt me. You're still not a bad guy underneath it all. So, you know, thanks."

Chris lets out a sigh. "Do you need a ride home?"

"Thanks but no thanks," Stiles says. "My pack is going to be pissed enough that I did all of this without me getting a ride home from an Argent."

He climbs the stairs without looking back.

* * *

_One more chapter to go!_


	11. Chapter 11

_A/N: Stiles: like a BOSS._

Chapter Eleven

Stiles' Jeep is parked on a side road about two blocks away. He walks there, not as slowly as he would have feared. He's still exhausted, but if anything the exhaustion has lessened, blown away in a wash of adrenaline and the exhilaration of victory. He calls the hospital while he walks, to check on his father. The nurse informs him that he's doing much better, and at the moment is sleeping peacefully. He was awake earlier and asking for Stiles, but subsided easily when told that he was in school. The plainclothes officer on his door has made sure that he wasn't disturbed.

Stiles had been worried that putting a guard on his father's door might tip off the Argents, but Carmichael had insisted. Scott and Derek had been taking turns staying with him, and both of them were tired. Stiles knew that the Argents had to be itching to get back in and give him another dose. But it was a risk he had to take. He wouldn't let his father be dosed again. It was too dangerous.

He feels better after hanging up with the nurse, and drives back to his house. Given the givens, he's not at all surprised to find Derek, Scott, and Lydia all on his front porch. He parks the Jeep and walks up to the door. "Hey, uh, hey guys," he says.

The response he gets is not what he expected.

"What did you do?" Derek snarls, and then before Stiles can even think about moving, Derek lunges at him. He knocks them both back through the railing of the porch, breaking it, and it hurts. It hurts a lot, and it hurts more when they slam into the ground with Derek's weight pinning him there, but somehow it doesn't hurt as much as Stiles suspects it should. "What did you do?" Derek roars, his eyes gleaming bright silvery blue only a few inches away from Stiles, and blue, that's not right – Derek should be alpha now, they should be red –

Stiles doesn't have time to say anything before Derek's weight is knocked off of him and he hears the familiar sound of Scott growling. The two of them roll away in a heap before getting back to their feet, both of them wolfed out, and start circling each other. Scott springs forward and Stiles moves without thinking, pushing his way in between the two of them and shouting, "Stop it!"

Much to his surprise, both of them do. They skid to a halt and just stare at him.

It's Lydia who finally says something, and then it's just, "Stiles, you – you – "

Stiles turns to look at her and sees himself reflected in the windshield of his Jeep, sees the bright crimson shine in his eyes.

"What," he chokes out. He clears his throat and tries it again. "What."

Derek is staring at him, his features slowly reverting back to normal. When he speaks, his voice is very quiet. "What. Did you. Do."

Stiles knows that now would not be a time for lies even if he could get away with it. He faces Derek and meets his gaze. He owes him at least that much. "I killed Peter. I poisoned him with wolfsbane. They, the Argents, they had him in their basement. They were torturing him. I had to. I _had_ to."

Derek can still only stare, and the expression on his face is clogged up with so many different, conflicting emotions, Stiles can't even guess how he's really feeling, if it's hatred or happiness, loathing or love.

Lydia clears her throat and says, "Maybe we should take this conversation inside."

They file in slowly and go into the kitchen. Derek stands with his hands clenched down on the back of one of the chairs. "How long have you known?" he asks, his voice stiff, an inch away from a snarl.

"Shit," Stiles says, pushing his hands back over his hair. "Time has all kind of blended together. A week, maybe two."

"You didn't tell me." It's not a question. Derek walks over and traps Stiles against the wall, both his hands gripping down on Stiles' upper arms.

Stiles takes a deep breath and tries to stop shaking. It's been a hell of a long day. "No, Derek, I didn't tell you. Because I didn't know what you would do, and I was – I was scared for you. I thought you might bust in and try to rescue him and get yourself killed. Or bust in and try to kill him and get yourself killed. The only way any of us was getting in there was if I kept gaining Gerard's trust, so that's what I did."

Scott and Lydia are standing on the opposite sides of the table, watching this discussion, which is almost an argument but without any shouting, go back and forth.

"You. Didn't. Tell me."

"No," Stiles says, and lets it sit, just holding Derek's gaze, his face only a few inches away. "I didn't."

When the silence has drawn on a moment too long, Scott says, "But, how are you . . . I mean, he didn't . . ."

Stiles shakes his head. "He didn't turn me. Hell, he never even touched me. I can't even begin to explain why . . ." He almost can't force the words out, and when he does, they come out with his voice rising at the end, like it's a question. "I'm the alpha?"

Derek lets out a low growl.

"Well," Lydia says, her tone somewhat reluctant, as if she doesn't want to get involved and give an opinion, "this may have never happened before. I mean, alpha werewolves are pretty hard to kill. It would be rare that a human would be able to kill one. And when they do, it's probably always a hunter. A hunter wouldn't be part of a pack."

Scott frowns at this, putting it all together. "So a human can become the alpha of a pack, as long as they're part of the pack when they kill the alpha?"

"That's what the evidence would suggest," Lydia says.

"I'm sorry," Stiles says. The words come out in a rush. "But Derek, what you, you have to understand is that the uncle you loved, the uncle you cared about, he died in that fire. Because when I asked Peter if he had anything he wanted to say, he didn't take that opportunity to beg for his life or tell me to tell you he was sorry he had killed Laura or anything like that. He told me about how Gerard had run my father down and then laughed about it afterwards. With his last _breath_, he was still trying to get revenge on them. The Peter I killed wasn't the man you remember as your uncle, Derek, and he was never going to be that man again.

"I didn't _do_ this because of what Peter did to me," he continues. "That's what you have to understand. I did it because . . . shit, Derek, because he was never going to stop. Because we were crippled without an alpha and none of us would have ever accepted him. I did it to stop him, I did it to save him, I did it for the pack, for all of us. And if you hate me for that, okay, I'll deal with that, but you have to at least understand why I killed him."

Derek says nothing for a long minute. Then he just leans forward, still keeping Stiles pinned, his forehead resting against the wall over Stiles' shoulder. Stiles wraps his arms around him and hugs him tightly. "Derek, I'm sorry," he says. "I am so damn sorry."

They stand like that for several minutes. Finally, Derek lets out a shuddery breath and pulls away. The others pretend they don't notice when he wipes his eyes with the corner of his sleeve before thudding into a chair.

"So what happened with the Argents?" Lydia finally asks.

Stiles gives her a thumbs up as the group of them sit down around the kitchen table. "All according to plan. Gerard's arrested and pissed as hell. Carmichael is taking him to lock-up a couple towns over – he wouldn't even tell me where. He says he wants to make sure there's no interference. Occasionally he can do something right, I guess."

"Was Allison okay?" Scott asks, even though Allison was never in any danger, because he's Scott.

"Yeah, she's fine," Stiles says.

"So . . . you're the alpha now," Scott says, as if he wants to be clear on this.

"I guess," Stiles says, with a shrug.

Lydia and Scott glance at each other. Then, in unison, they both nod a little. "Okay," Scott says.

"Okay?" Derek snaps. "He's not even a wolf. You wouldn't accept _me_ as your alpha, but you'll accept him?"

Stiles flinches away a little, involuntarily. Scott just holds Derek's gaze and says, "Yeah, Derek, I will. Because I trust Stiles. I've known him since I was a little kid. I know that he'll always do what's best for the pack."

Derek pushes both hands through his hair. "That's really touching and all, but we can't have a human as an alpha."

It looks like Scott might take exception to this remark, but then Lydia reaches over and touches Derek's wrist. "But he's not just any human," she says. "He's Stiles."

Derek blinks at her for a minute, then looks at Stiles, almost like he's seeing him for the first time that evening. Then he just lets out a little sigh.

"I'm sorry," Stiles says. "I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't mean to steal something that was supposed to be yours. I had no idea it would happen this way. But . . . if we're going to be a pack, if we're going to make this work, I have to know . . . will you accept me as your alpha?"

Derek looks at him for a long minute. He doesn't glare, or snarl, or curl his lip. He just looks at him. Then he nods and says, "Yes."

Everything snaps into place then, and Stiles understands all in a rush what Derek had meant about how being in a pack, having an alpha, made them stronger. He can feel so much more than he could before. It dwarfs even the change of having become the alpha in the first place. He can feel Scott, warm and solid to his left, and Lydia, cool and clear like a spring night, even Allison, a faint hum of music. And Derek. A core of metal and earth, a rock he'll always be able to lean his back against.

From the looks on their faces, they're all affected the same way. Stiles lets out a shaky breath. "Okay," he says. "Okay, yeah, this . . . this is good, this is going to work." He laughs, a noise approaching hysteria. "Who wants cookies? Because I could really go for some gingersnaps right now . . ."

And then they're all laughing, even Derek.

"What if we want to add to the pack?" Lydia says, when the moment of hilarity has passed.

"Uh . . ." Stiles shrugs. "Derek can do it. He'll be, like, my right hand man. You know. In charge of the wolfy stuff."

Scott gives Derek a somewhat uneasy look, and then says, "What, like, co-captains?"

Stiles lets out an involuntary snort of laughter, even though it's not really funny. Because this isn't Scott making a joke. This is Scott testing the boundaries, pushing his luck, making sure that he's safe.

Derek gives Scott a look and just says, "Seriously?"

Now Scott laughs, too. There's a note of hysteria in it, a note of 'I can handle Derek being in charge of me if he doesn't take offense at everything I say', a note of 'everything's finally going to be okay'. Before long they're all laughing again.

Finally, Stiles wobbles to his feet. "I'm going to go to the hospital, then."

"What! No," Scott says. "You're going to stay here and sleep. You haven't slept in like three days and you look like a piece of crap."

"Dog crap," Lydia adds helpfully.

"Hey, uh, no, I'm going to go see my dad," Stiles says.

Derek folds his arms over his chest and says, "No. No, you are not."

Stiles scowls. "I thought I was the alpha now."

"Yes," Derek says. "You are the alpha who is going to stay here and sleep."

Stiles groans and slumps over the table. "You guys are bossy jerks," he says, but stops arguing. Derek has to carry him up the stairs, he's so tired. Lydia strips him out of his jeans and shirt while he mumbles about the joy of being undressed by her. He's almost asleep by the time there are three wolves on his bed with him, and he rolls over and leans his face into someone's fur, not knowing who it is, not even caring.

* * *

Derek doesn't say anything about it, but Stiles is learning to read him, so he calls Chris Argent on the phone the next day and says that Derek would like the body of his uncle returned to him so it can be buried on the Hale family property. Chris agrees to this, somewhat warily, and Stiles tells him to meet them at the house at four o'clock that afternoon. He still has school, after all. He visits his father that morning, but he's sleeping, and Stiles doesn't want to wake him.

He sets the stage carefully for this meeting, because he wants to make an impression. So when Chris Argent walks into the Hale house, he's almost immediately surrounded. Stiles is standing just to the left of the staircase, with his hand on the banister. Scott and Allison are sitting on the third step, holding hands, their legs touching. Derek is to the right, crouched in the corner just by the door, as dark and formidable as always, and Lydia is on Stiles' other side, leaning against the door frame to the next room. There's nowhere for Chris to go except right back out the way he came.

But he waves his men inside, two lackeys carrying an actual body bag. They lay it down just in front of Chris, being careful with it, almost gentle. Stiles is the one who kneels down beside it and unzips it a few inches, to make sure Peter's body is actually inside. He gives Derek a brief nod, and sees some of the tension in the older man's shoulders ease away. Stiles zips the bag up, gestures to the two men without looking up, and says flatly, "Get out."

The two of them give Chris an uneasy look, but he nods at them, so they back out of the house and shut the door behind them. Then Stiles rises to his feet and turns to look at Chris, his eyes flaring crimson. Chris actually takes a step back, though more from surprise than fear. Stiles holds out a hand and says, "Stiles Stilinski. I'll be your alpha this evening."

Chris clears his throat. "You . . ."

"I killed Peter Hale," Stiles says, "and this is my pack. We've got a few things we need to get straight."

Recovering from his shock, Chris gives him a nod. "Okay."

"I've got video of you at the crime scene where the omega was killed," Stiles says. "So far, Gerard is taking the fall for pretty much everything, but that's not the way it has to be. So. Let's be clear. There will be no more hunting of werewolves on my territory. No more traps, no more arrows, no more anything. My territory is this county. That ought to keep you out of my father's hair, too, since as you may or may not recall, he's the county sheriff. Is that clear?"

Chris nods again. "Yes."

"If you want to hunt werewolves outside this county, that's your business and their problem."

"Okay."

"If you have reason to suspect a werewolf – or any supernatural creature – is up to mischief inside my territory, you'll bring it directly to me. If it's someone outside my pack, I'll give you permission to hunt them down. If it's someone inside my pack, I'll deal with it myself."

Chris folds his arms over his chest. "What if I don't like the way you deal with it?"

Stiles gives him a smile that shows teeth. "Suck it."

Chris says nothing.

"Frankly I'd be happier if you just left my county altogether, but I don't want to have to listen to Scott bitch about how skype sex just doesn't measure up to the real thing," Stiles continues. Chris gives the couple on the stairs a sharp look. Allison innocently studies the ceiling. "And on that note, this whole thing with Scott and Allison? Yeah, that's not going away. Deal with it. They're going to keep seeing each other, and you'll just have to live with it. And even if they don't wind up living happily ever after, Allison is still a member of my pack, and that's not going to change. Is all that clear, too?"

Chris has to agree through gritted teeth.

"Okay. One more thing to remember. I know that what you're thinking right now is that I don't have enough evidence to get you convicted, or maybe even charged. You're probably right. Oh, I could probably get you on accessory to murder in the omega's case, but there's no evidence that you were involved in anything that happened with my father. And I don't think you were, obviously, or we'd be having an extremely different discussion. However, you might want to remember that your career is selling guns – mainly to law enforcement. If they get even the smallest whiff that you might have helped try to kill a cop, then you'll be blacklisted before you can take the fifth. I can't destroy you the way I did Gerard, but I can ruin you if you don't play by my rules. Got it?"

Chris nods. "I understand."

"Good. Now get off my territory. And never come here again. This is private fucking property. If you ever set foot on it again, I'll have you arrested for trespassing."

Chris gives a final nod, then turns and leaves the house.

The pack sits in silence for a few minutes, listening to the Argents get into their car and drive away. Stiles lets out a sigh of relief, glad that it's over with.

Derek rises from his crouch and walks over to his uncle's body. He pulls the bag's zipper down and studies the face underneath. It's a little gray, now, but the muscles have relaxed, the wrinkles smoothed out. For better or for worse, Peter Hale is at peace.

Stiles brought enough shovels for everybody. They let Derek break ground, but then they all help. He snarls a little, but doesn't actively try to stop them. They take turns, even Lydia, until the grave is deep enough. Then they take turns tossing soil over Peter's body.

Finally, it's done. Derek stands at the head of the grave, not saying anything, just staring at it, one knuckle pressed against his lips as though he's afraid of what he might say. Stiles stands with him. He doesn't say anything either. Finally, he leans against Derek, pressing his cheek into Derek's shoulder.

"You did the right thing, you know," Derek says.

"Mm?" Stiles replies.

"Killing him. It was the right thing to do."

Stiles glances up at him. "Does that mean you're okay with it?"

Derek lets out a sigh. "That might take a little longer," he says, but he wraps an arm around Stile's shoulders and pulls him closer.

The sun is setting and it's getting chilly. Finally, Stiles says, "One more stop to make today."

Derek lets him go. "I'll see you in a few hours."

* * *

When Stiles gets to his father's hospital room, Sheriff Stilinski is sitting up in bed, awake, eating a bowl of oatmeal, and talking to Melissa McCall. Stiles takes one look at him and finally breaks down completely. He's not even ashamed of it after everything that's happened. He sits down next to his father's bed, buries his face in his lap, and just sobs. His father rubs his back and smoothes his hair until he's cried himself out.

"You don't look so good," Stilinski says, when Stiles finally sits up and begins sipping from a cup of water.

"It's just . . . kind of been a rough week," Stiles says.

His father nods and frowns. "Melissa told me that I've been in and out for a couple weeks, but it's all pretty blurry. She said to ask you what's been going on, because you know more about it than me."

"Yeah." Stiles hiccups a little. "What's the last thing you remember?"

As it turns out, his father has no memory of seeing the omega killed, or being chased down by Gerard Argent. He frowns when he hears this story, mutters something about being a damn fool for not calling for backup. Stiles doesn't argue, because he privately agrees. There are obvious reasons why his father didn't call his men for backup, but he wishes that he had called Derek. He can see why he didn't, having watched Gerard cut a werewolf in half, but still.

Stiles even shows him the video in an effort to jog his memory, but there's nothing. From what Stiles knows of brain injuries – which is a lot, by now – he's pretty sure those memories are never coming back. And to be honest, he's okay with that. It must have been a pretty terrible experience, all things considered.

His father is alert and curious, so Stiles tells him everything. He starts with the sessions with Gerard and finding Peter in his basement, then the phone. He tells his father about how he put the pieces together. How Allison snuck into Gerard's room while he was showering and took a picture of his credit card so Stiles could track the financial information with Danny's help. How he put together the fact that his father was being poisoned with wolfsbane because he had accidentally poisoned himself with it while repotting it. How they had set up the camera in his room and all taken turns sitting with the feed in the bathroom until Scott had caught the lackey red-handed, and then flushed the toilet and left the bathroom, saying, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know anyone was in here right now." The henchman had slunk away, but not before they got his face on film.

"Huh," Stilinski says at the end of it. "That is some damned fine detective work there."

Stiles blushes and rubs his hand over the back of his head, embarrassed. He hurries on to explain how Allison let him into the house so he could confront Gerard and get his reaction on tape – carefully stopping the recording before anyone talked about who had killed Peter. Not that he's told his father who killed Peter yet. He wants to be honest, full and completely, but the idea of telling his father that makes his stomach squirm. He's not sure he can, but the moment of truth is fast approaching.

"So . . . Gerard Argent is being held for murder of the omega . . ."

"Whose identity is still unknown and whose body still has not been found," Stiles says with a nod, "but they'll find it soon, I bet, because Chris Argent probably knows where they buried it."

"And attempted murder in my case, and . . . aggravated assault for the poisoning, probably?"

"No, actually, because he never came in here and did it himself," Stiles says. "Their minion is getting charged with that one. Gerard got . . . conspiracy to commit a felony, or something like that." Stiles rubs a hand over the back of his head. He must be more tired than he had realized. "Shit, normally I would know this. Carmichael could give you more details, I guess."

"I'm glad he didn't give you too hard a time," Stilinski says.

"Well, once I had that video you took, he couldn't really shut me down," Stiles says, "and Mrs. McCall backed me up on the fact that you were being poisoned. Still, I spent half the damned day in his office answering questions."

"Were the Argents charged with anything in regards to Peter Hale?" his father asks.

Stiles chews on his fingernail, his feet tapping away at the floor. "Uh, no. Because Carmichael doesn't know anything about what they were doing to Peter Hale."

Stilinski raises his eyebrows at his son. "You just forgot to mention the fact that they had a man captive in their basement?"

"Dad, I – I need to tell you what happened to Peter, but I, I need you to promise me something," Stiles says in a rush. "Promise me that you won't hate me."

A frown crosses his father's face, but he sees that Stiles is serious. He lets out a little sigh and reaches out, giving Stiles' hand a squeeze. "Stiles, I could never hate you," he said. "This isn't to say that I don't sometimes find you infuriating. But you're my son, and I love you, and I will always love you no matter what. Never doubt that. Okay?"

Stiles nods and swallows the lump in his throat. He could look Peter in the eye before killing him; he could look Derek in the eye when he told him. But his gaze is trained on his shoes as he says to his father, "I killed Peter. I poisoned him with wolfsbane." He hears his father suck in a breath, and won't look up. "Without an alpha, the pack was always going to be weak. To be vulnerable to hunters, or any other werewolf pack that wanted the territory. And Peter had to be dealt with. _Someone_ had to do it, and I was the only one who could get to him." His eyes are stinging now, and he wipes the tears away. "I couldn't let him get free, because he would have hurt people I care about. So I did what I had to do."

Stilinski slowly lets out a breath. "That . . . that is one hell of a thing you did, son."

Stiles nods again. "I know."

Stilinski rubs his hands over his face. "I won't say 'there must have been another way', because I know you, and I know that you worked through all the options. I know that Peter was crazy and that because he was an alpha, the normal law enforcement system couldn't have handled him. And I don't think it would have been better for you to put his death at someone else's door, not even Derek's." He reaches out and grips Stiles' forearm tightly. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I . . ." Stiles draws in a shaky breath. "I think I am. Because . . . Peter knew what I was doing. And he didn't tell me to stop. Didn't try to fight me. He . . . wanted it. In his own way. He needed it to be over as much as any of us did. And that's why I can deal with this. Because he didn't try to stop me."

Stilinski hooks an arm around his son's shoulders and draws him into another hug. Stiles relaxes into it.

"Oh, and uh . . . I guess I'm the alpha now." Stiles gives his father an almost sheepish smile. "Don't even ask me how that happened, nobody's really sure."

Stilinski frowns. "You're not a wolf."

"Nope. But I seem to have gotten some of the perks. They don't seem so much physical, the way Scott's were, but . . . things are clearer now. I got some of the heightened senses. And I can _feel_ the others, like, internally . . . I would know if one of them were hurt or scared, and I can tell when one of them is getting close by. It's like . . . some kind of psychic link, I guess."

"Damn, son," Stilinski says with a sigh. "I didn't think things could get weirder."

"I know, right?" Stiles can't help but laugh. "But I think it's going to be okay, Dad. I, I really do. Things have been so awful and fucked up, but . . . they're getting better." He lets out a breath. "Finally, they're getting better."

"Okay," his father says. "And for the record, Stiles . . . you'll make a good cop someday. And a great alpha."

Stiles swallows and smiles. "Thanks, Dad."

* * *

Derek, as it turns out, studied art and architecture in school for the year that he actually went to college. He's apparently also a decent hand at carpentry, and helps them get the front steps of the Stilinski porch converted to a wheelchair ramp. He also fixes the railing that he broke, without being asked.

Sheriff Stilinski really doesn't want to use the wheelchair ramp, and Stiles has to remind him no less than four times that he still has quite a bit of rehab to go through before he's going to be walking around with any confidence. His gait is still somewhat unsteady, and his motor coordination has suffered some. His arm is in a sling to protect his fractured shoulder blade, and his ankle is still casted. The physical therapists are confident that he'll make a full recovery, but it's going to take time.

It's probably a good thing that he's not standing, since he almost definitely would fall over when he's greeted by the 'welcome home' banner and the crowd of people waiting to greet him. It's not a pack party, because Deputy Carmichael is there along with a bunch of other police officers, as well as Melissa McCall and some of their other neighbors.

There's plenty of food, although Derek can't be trusted with the grill because his idea of a cooked steak is 'lightly seared on both sides', so Stiles is in charge, though he makes sure to leave some extra rare for the wolves present. He also has to fend Scott off from his plate at least three times. He's starving; it feels like he's barely eaten in weeks.

So there's steaks and rolls and a veggie tray which Stilinski refuses to even look at, and Stiles reminds him not to eat too much red meat and then gives him a gigantic steak anyway. What the hell, they're celebrating. There's cake, of course, which says 'Welcome Home' on it. Stiles had the bakery at the grocery store do that. He can bake cookies, but he doesn't really know which end of a pastry bag is which. His father's not allowed to have alcohol yet so Stiles asked everyone to put up with it being alcohol free, and instead serves iced tea and lemonade.

Scott and Allison spend most of the party making out, and everyone's surprised when Chris Argent makes a brief appearance. He pulls Sheriff Stilinski aside and talks to him quietly for a few minutes before departing. "What was that about?" Stiles asks.

"He wanted to give me his assurance that the law has his full cooperation in the case against his father," Stilinski says.

Stiles grins. "Wonder what brought that on."

"I wonder," Stilinski says, rolling his eyes. But Stiles thinks that maybe, just maybe, Chris is just as relieved as the rest of them to be seeing his father behind bars. Gerard Argent has been denied bail, both because he committed crimes against an officer of the law and because he's been judged a flight risk. The case will be expedited, because he has good lawyers. Stiles talked to the prosecutor briefly about the fact that he will need to testify, since he's the one who found his father's phone in the Argent's basement, and the one who found the car. Stiles is almost looking forward to it.

But other things are going on, and it's not a huge weight on his mind. School is getting busy again. Harris seemed to think that Gerard's fall from grace meant he could go back to abusing Stiles in chemistry class. Stiles spent an entire period just grinning at him from his seat, no matter what Harris said. It unnerved the man so badly that from then on, he hasn't looked at Stiles once.

He's out of lacrosse indefinitely, because he'll need to be home to take care of his father and make sure he gets to all his physical therapy appointments for the next few months, by which point lacrosse season will be over. But he goes to the games to see Scott play and cheer him on, and in fact spent the last one with Lydia sitting in his lap, causing Jackson to miss three different goals.

Jackson has been informed by Stiles that he's not going to be a member of their pack, ever. Jackson got up in his face and again threatened to go public. Stiles just laughed at him and said, "Yeah, go tell everyone that the werewolf club is denying you entry. Have a jolly good time with that. Tell the men in white coats that I said hi."

Since then, Jackson has been a little less insufferable than usual, although only a little. He seems to be sulking.

Danny was rewarded for his help with Gerard's financials by a video of Derek getting up in the morning, forgetting all about the fact that he's naked, and wandering around with a coffee cup in one hand for a full ten minutes before it occurs to him that he's standing on the Stilinski's front porch and he might want to put some clothes on.

All in all, everything's working out, and if Stiles still has nightmares, well, he's not the only one in the pack who does.

The party winds down after a few hours, and it's getting late. The pack helps Stiles get everything cleaned up, all the trash picked up and the food put away. Then Stiles helps his father up the stairs. He's a little wobbly and clearly tired, but on his feet. He's steady enough to shower without help, and get into his pajamas. Stiles insists on tucking him in.

"You're going to be a pain in my ass about this invalid thing, aren't you," Stilinski grumbles.

"Oh, yeah," Stiles says, grinning. "Big time."

His father gives him a flinty glare, and Stiles loves every second of it.

The group of them settle downstairs to watch a movie. It's a school night, but nobody cares. Scott has already told his mother he'll be sleeping at Stiles' house that night. Since he seems to do more homework on the nights when he is at Stiles' versus when he isn't, she doesn't argue. Allison just does what she wants now, despite her mother's voluble protests, and Lydia's parents don't seem to have any idea where she is on any given night or that she hasn't slept in her own bed in weeks.

They adjourn upstairs at the end of the movie, and Stiles revels in the fact that it is a normal night with a normal routine. He packs a lunch to take to school for everyone, then showers and brushes his teeth and thinks about the fact that he'll need a haircut soon.

The others are all in bed by the time he gets there, but Derek is still in his human form, reading one of Stiles' comic books. They've left him his usual space, between Derek's reassuring, solid bulk and the tangle of limbs that is AlliScott. Lydia is in wolf form, curled up by Derek's feet, but when Stiles climbs into bed she stretches out, using his thigh as a pillow.

Derek starts to get up, knowing that if he shifts while in bed, he'll just mess up the blankets, but Stiles grabs him by the wrist and drags him back down. "It's okay like this," he says, not even knowing where that came from, but knowing that it's true. Derek subsides, slumping back down into the pillows, and Stiles nestles down into the covers.

It's dark and quiet, which would have bothered him two weeks ago, but he's used to it now. It's a different kind of dark and quiet from the trunk of the car, a warm and reassuring kind. Everyone else is asleep, so he takes the moment to say, "Hey . . . I really am sorry. About the alpha thing."

Derek is silent for a minute. Then he just says, "You couldn't have anticipated it."

"I know," Stiles says. "But I'm still sorry."

"It's okay." Derek looks over at him, his eyes just barely visible in the dark, that faint sheen of blue-silver that's always there. "I wouldn't have expected it to be okay, but it is. Because Lydia was right. You're not just any human. You're Stiles."

"So everyone keeps telling me," Stiles says, but there's a note of humor in his voice. He's thinking back to what Derek had said in the hospital, thinking he was asleep, about how he considered Stiles his equal. He's still not sure how any of this is going to work, how he and Derek are going to share responsibilities and make the pack _theirs_, not just _his_. But what he is sure of is that it _will_ work. They'll work it out. It's a good feeling, a comforting certainty against the dark.

"You were right, though," Derek says. "I never expected I would be an alpha. I had older siblings, even older cousins, who would have been due for the position before me. Not only that, but one of them was Laura." He's quiet for a minute. "And Laura was just . . . amazing at everything she did."

Stiles reaches out to him, putting his cheek against Derek's shoulder, wrapping an arm around his waist. He wishes that there was something more he could do, some sort of comfort he could offer that would actually help. "Tell me about her?"

Derek doesn't say anything for so long that Stiles starts to worry he's upset him. But then he starts to talk. He talks about how Laura liked to climb trees, how she helped their father hang a tire swing for Derek when he was a little kid. How she encouraged him to go to school and study art even when other people made fun of him. How she held him at night, during those long, awful nights after the fire, how she was the only thing in his life he would have considered stable. How she had departed with the words, "I dunno, I just feel like something weird is going on. I'm gonna go check it out. See you in a few days."

It's difficult for him at first, but the words flow more easily, the more he talks about her, and Stiles gets a picture in his head of what an incredible person Laura was, and how devastating the loss had been. When Derek finally stops talking, Stiles says, "I'm really sorry, Derek."

"I know," Derek says. "Thanks. For . . . letting me talk about her."

"Any time," Stiles says.

He sees Derek smile just a little. "And that's why you'll make a better alpha than I would have. I'm okay at giving orders, but . . . not so good at taking care of people. And that's a big part of what the alpha does. Takes care of his pack."

"Yeah, I'm a natural at that," Stiles says, thinking back to all the time he's pestered his father to watch his cholesterol, to the times he's harangued Scott into doing his homework, to the times when he's sent flowers or little cards to Lydia when it was obvious that Jackson was being a jerk to her, just to see her smile. "That's okay too, you know. Sometimes you just need to let someone take care of you. Even you need that."

He expects Derek to scowl or snarl at this, but instead Derek just turns into him a little, nuzzling his face into Stiles' neck. "Maybe," he allows.

It's a win, and Stiles accepts it for what it is. He thinks of some different things to say, some of them clever, some of them sappy, as he lies there and enjoys being surrounded by his family, by his pack. Lydia's head is still resting on his thigh, and Scott has flung his arm out in his sleep so it's flopped against Stiles' stomach, and he can feel Derek's breath on his throat, which should be unnerving but isn't. He thinks of a lot of different things to say, but then he realizes that Derek has fallen asleep, and before long so he has he.

~fin~

* * *

_A/N: Thanks for reading, everyone! I've really loved writing this fic. I feel like there's so much more I can do with this AU I've created - it'd be fun to watch them bring the others into the pack, and then the alpha pack shows up and goes "what, a human alpha, how does that even *work*?" So more may follow in this series if I survive the Christmas chaos season. =D_


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